Whither went the warmer weather?

The Long Pause just got three months longer. Last month, the RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies showed no global warming for exactly 204 months – the first dataset to show the full 17 years without warming specified by Santer as demonstrating that the models are in fundamental error.

The sharp drop in global temperature in the past month has made itself felt, and not just in the deep snow across much of North America and the Middle East. The RSS data to November 2013, just available after a delay caused by trouble with the on-board ephemeris on one of the satellites, show no global warming at all for 17 years 3 months.

It is intriguing, and disturbing, that WattsUpWithThat is just about the only place where you will be allowed to see this or any graph showing the spectacularly zero trend line through 207 continuous months of data.

On any objective test of newsworthiness, the fact of 17 years 3 months with no global warming is surely of more than passing interest to audiences who have been terrified, over and over again, by the over-confident proclamations of the true-believers that catastrophic global warming was the surest of sure things.

Yet the mainstream news media, having backed the wrong horse, cannot bear to tear up their betting slips and move along. They thought they had a hot tip on global warming. They were naïve enough to believe Scientists Say was a dead cert. Yet the spavined nag on which they had bet the ranch fell at the first fence.

The inventiveness with which They wriggle is impressive. Maybe all that air pollution from China is like a parasol. Maybe the warming somehow snuck sneakily past the upper 2000 feet of the ocean so that it didn’t notice, and perhaps it’s lurking in the benthic strata where we can’t measure it. Maybe it’s just waiting to come out when we least expect it and say, “Boo!”.

Anyway, so the wrigglers say, The World Is Still Warming. It must be, because The Models Say So. They say our adding CO2 to the atmosphere is the same as Blowing up Four Whole Atom Bombs Somewhere On Earth Every Second!!!! Just imagine all that HEAT!

Well, it isn’t real. “Imagine” is the right word. If the world were warming, the most sensitive indicator of that warming would be the atmosphere itself. Since the atmosphere has not been warming for 17 years 3 months, an awful possibility is beginning to dawn on even the dimmest of the climate extremists – or, at least, those of them who have somehow found out about the Long Pause.

Maybe natural influences are still strong enough to pull in the other direction and cancel the predicted warming. Maybe the models got the forcing wrong, or the feedbacks wrong, or the climate-sensitivity parameter wrong, or the amplification equation wrong, or the non-radiative transports wrong.

Maybe – heresy of heresies – CO2 is just not that big of a deal any more.

Yet it ought to be having some effect. All other things being equal, even without temperature feedbacks we should be seeing 1 Celsius degree of global warming for every doubling of CO2 concentration.

It is more likely than not that global warming will return eventually. Not at the predicted rate, but it will return. It would be wisest, then, to look not only at the now embarrassingly lengthening Long Pause but also at the now embarrassingly widening Gaping Gap between the +0.23 Celsius/decade predicted by the models for the first half of this century and the –0.02 Celsius/decade that is actually happening.

Meanwhile, Scotland has been enjoying one of the mildest Decembers of recent times. But February is when it usually turns really cold up here. John Betjeman recalled our winters in one of his verses, and raised what has become for climate extremists everywhere the Great Unanswerable Question. Whither went the warmer weather?

17 years ago we were told that if mankind allowed the CO2 to rise to 400 ppm that the temperatures would skyrocket. The situation would turn the earth into a veritable hell of heat. Life itself was in peril!

So, a grand experiment was conducted by mankind in association with mother nature. CO2 was cranked up to 400 ppm and the temperatures held steady even with Hansen and others “adjusting” the heck out of the data. Any honest man with an IQ above that of an ape would understand that the CO2 hypothesis of the alarmists has failed. Failed as badly as the one that said the earth was the center of the universe.

Almost right. Implies, does not prove. I’d go further and suggest does not invalidate correlation. The is an unfortunate slice of wiggle room left. That said, lack of correlation, lack of back testing confirmation, lack of trend all pretty much box in the warmist theories into a very tiny corner.

Why this is not proof. Any random series of datums can show no correlation over long periods of observation even when there is a trend bias underlying. Think of a weighted coin. 102% it “should” come up heads but it can come up trending tails 20-30% across a span with no violation of any law or even being unusual. We saw a spike in temps culminating with 1998. We’ve seen a pause since. Neither series invalidates the other. The pause does not invalidate the rise and vice versa.

Mosher, those of us who remember you from the CA days know over time you’ve become delusional at worse and pig headed at best.

No amount of time will convince you the models are crap or that the AGW hypothesis is seriously screwed up. The absolute fact is the troposphere did not warm as advertised it would for the past 25 years when all this fear mongering starting about the “greenhouse” effect. It’s bunk, it’s junk, it’s happening.

The great thing about this scam is mankind has, for a while an infallible yardstick for politicians, scientists and journalists, we now know who is corrupt and whom we might trust! I cannot think when we have ever been in this position! We also know who should loose their career, qualifications and all assets and be banished for the taxpayers purse!

So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.

You might have noticed that a number of warmists, professional and amateur, are tip-toeing away from cAGW and merging into lukewarmers.
I am just waiting for the ‘Young Turks’ to stand up and go all Maoist on their elders.

Perhaps not ‘implies’ but it’s not looking good for the GCMs. They have been wrong, wrong, wrong. Now if I could just get my liberal friends to listen to something other than NPR and read something other than the NYTimes. They haven’t said this, but I think they believe that if doesn’t come from these two sources, it’s just not trustworthy.

The simplest explanation is of course that a severe natural cooling trend is already underway but unnatural (and naturally highly amplified) greenhouse warming is merely canceling it out. This natural cooling phase also falsifies the whole alarmist horse race tip too though, so mum’s the word. That massive statistical fraud was clearly found at the very center of climate “science” makes the likes of Steve Mosher into immoral enablers of that criminal fraud, as they were the best informed citizens, unlike policy makers and laymen.

Some have a difficult time with the idea that anthropogenic emission is largely irrelevant to atmospheric concentration. Their thinking seems to them to be indisputable. i.e. Since we know that atmospheric enhancement is only about ½ our human emission, then removing our human emission would more than account for a reconciliation.

According to some using this thinking, cutting our emission in half might yield a near perfect reconciliation. As if a reconciliation of any sort might produce some meaningful benefit to climate variations (and it would only be, at most, geologically momentary till some natural event changed things again, one way or the other). The cartoon below attempts to illustrate why it is that our contribution is not particularly relevant using some very rough personal yet rational guestimates to make the point.

During the Little Ice Age, natural sinks had overtaken sources so atmospheric CO2 fell (caused by cooling). The warming since then has stimulated natural sources which, in turn, have stimulated natural sinks. And the sources are now out in front, with our modest help to be sure. But both sources and sinks have been growing far more rapidly than our anthropogenic contribution in absolute terms. So if our contribution were to be removed in its entirety, there would be little identifiable change. Microbial and insect emissions would more than make up the difference if we let them**. And had we not contributed our 2%, the vegetative sinks would have been most likely under-stimulated by a somewhat similar amount such that there would be little identifiable change. (The water tub analogy where a spigot is filling the CO2 tub, while a drain is draining it, is entirely misleading in the way it is often presented as there is a clearly coupled relationship between changes to the rates of input and output – at least till a saturation event occurs.)

And if the Earth continues to be warm but then starts to cool, at some likely predictable point the photosynthetic sequestering sinks will saturate (so that their increasing capacity to sink CO2 will quit increasing; and then for the same continued cooling causes, these sinks will subsequently and rapidly reverse to a decreasing capacity to absorb CO2; while the emission sources more slowly respond; and the oceans, in particular, fail to respond for many decades). Then very steep atmospheric spiking will ensue just as it so often has in the past. It is very likely that photosynthetic sequestering (biological response) provides an enormous (geologically real-time) negative feedback to additional atmospheric CO2 until such time as it saturates. This predicted saturation event is not likely very near if the planet continues to slide sideways on temperature. However, a near-term solar-driven mini ice age may likely accelerate this predictable spiking event into the near term (i.e. atmospheric CO2 will likely increase sharply soon).

**If, for some inexplicable reason, we somehow came to rationally conclude that the Earthly atmospheric CO2 content should rightfully be driven down by our future anthropogenic actions, the most obvious (and simple) actions we could take would involve our further limiting the exponentially growing contribution coming from our competitors in this arena: microbes and insects. A yet further global reduction in their competitive contribution by only ~6% would more than account for the otherwise complete elimination of our anthropogenic CO2 contribution in its entirety. And while this course of action is loaded with potential pitfalls, it is trivially within our anthropogenic means. We have already accumulated a great deal of experience in this regard and already have great insight to its pitfalls (something similar to but certainly much less drastic than what we have done in the lands we use for cultivation and occupation might be performed in certain other lands that we do not currently treat as such). It could likely be done in such a way as to yet further increase crop yields while further minimizing the spread of disease. And it likely is far less subject to unintended consequence than many (all) geo-engineering proposals on the table at this time that I know of – none of which make any sense to me – including this particularly obvious and simple suggested course of action. Why in the world would we choose it inhibit the proliferation of all life on Earth by offsetting our 2% Vitamin C(O2)? Especially when Nature will continue to wield its 98% in ways totally out of our anthropogenic control.

Climate is a very complex phenomena. One of the main problem with AGW is the narrow mindedness focus on the impact of carbon dioxide on climate. That is T= f( CO2). Climate could be a function of a wide range of variables and feed backs which are discussed in various scientific papers. If T= f( CO2, solar activity, changes in earth tilts, etc), the concentration of carbon dioxide could increase dramatically and still T will go down or remain constant if the effects of the other variables are more more significant during this period. Hence, Mosher’s comment, absence of correlation dues not necessarily implies absence of causation.

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005 “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”

Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009 ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

All very true. I would suggest one wee modification.
“Yet the spavined nag on which they had bet the ranch fell at the first fence.”
As Bertie Wooster would have called it: ” A scratched at the post non-starter.”

Your challenge to the media is exactly what is needed now. It should be repeated until there is a media response. By “media response,” I do not mean another interview with Alarmists who repeat the same dogma. I mean an honest statement by the media of the criteria that they use to judge statements by Alarmists. If they cannot think of any, they could at least adopt an Alarmist standard, namely, Santer’s Seventeen Years. The media must now explain why there is reason for them to continue beating the drums of alarm.

Thank you, Christopher Monckton. Do remember to take some prescription vitamin D supplements. You are way up there. You are as far north as Latvia.

Gareth Phillips says:December 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm
So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet

– – –
Global temperatures rose during a time that anthropological CO2 could not have had an influence, they rose again at the same rate during a time that it could, and temperatures have not risen for 17+ years. Thermometers were invented and used for the first time during a cold phase of the planet. To get a negative trend over the temperature record, even if CO2 has no influence at all on temperatures, could take hundreds or even thousands of years. Or it could take 10 years.
If it’s a negative trend you are looking for, there is one if you start somewhere around 2005 :http://joannenova.com.au/2013/03/has-the-world-started-cooling-hints-from-4-of-5-global-temperature-sets-say-it-might-have/

Gareth Phillips;
I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Dance we shall, for we know full well that we dance on the grave of the Undead, and that the spectre of CAGW shall rise and rise again to haunt us all. We take solace in knowing full well that no matter how frightening the nightmare, it is, nonetheless, a dream. Those of us who studied the physics knew from the outset that CAGW was a horror story, but just a story. Yet such is the human condition that horror stories and nightmares keep us awake at night, for despite having looked many times to ascertain the facts, every little sound sows suspicion in our minds that perhaps, just perhaps, there are in fact, monsters under the bed.

So dance. Dance upon the grave of the Undead CAGW. Dance, knowing that it will rise to haunt us all again and again. Dance because there are no CAGW monsters under the bed, there never were, there never will be. Dance because every year that passes is like looking under the bed one more time and observing perhaps a lost sock, or balls of dust, a dried up piece of food, or maybe even a harmless mouse, but as for the Monster CAGW:

It is not just that the Sun has nodded off to sleep but that vulcanism has truly awakened. Gee, who would have thought it was only CO2 that caused ‘climate’?? hint, $$$$$$$$$$
A good read everyday/http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/
regards

Since the AGW theory basically relies on the belief that carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun that has been reflected from Earth (normally after a few hours delay) the temperature data will not make any sense until we use the appropriate measurement parameter. This is not a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year as these are all earthly measurement parameters. The parameter that should be used is the solar cycle since the sun is the ultimate source of the heat that can supposedly be trapped by greenhouse gases. But even when one uses the solar cycle as the primary measurement parameter we must remember that oceans, ice and land all store heat in various amounts for various lengths of time. Oceans and ice sheets store heat for very long times (often centuries or millennia) whereas non-forested land (deserts) give up stored heat within a relatively short time of the source of radiation going (i.e. at night).
We shouldn’t overlook that the sun provides energy to Earth in many ways. While most is provided in the long-wave length infra-red spectrum of photons the short wave-length spectrum also provides heat by a delayed reaction (as anyone who has had severe sunburn will attest). The shortest wave-length frequency also provides additional heat to the upper atmosphere through chemical reactions.
The AGW theory is and always was simplistic nonsense because the scientists involved were not measuring temperature changes using the right measurement parameters and they are not allowing for the leads and lags caused by periodic changes in the distribution of photon emissions from the sun.
If you just very roughly allow for the leads and lags then the only correlation that matters is the correlation between between the magnetic strength of each solar cycle (and its immediately previous solar cycle) and the average global temperature change during that cycle. Although there are not enough data points since modern instrumentation commenced it looks pretty likely that when solar cycles are very strong global temperatures rise and when the solar cycles are very weak temperatures firstly stabilize but then start to fall. There is a lot of proxy and anecdotal data to suggest this has always been the case.
There is one significant complication. Weak solar magnetic cycles cause increased volcanic activity due the increase in cosmic rays reaching the atmosphere and producing high energy atomic particles that penetrate and weaken the calderas of some types of volcanoes. Very large eruptions can produce an almost immediate fall in global temperatures because their emitted aerosols filter out some of the radiated heat from the sun. Although the aerosols will eventually clear it could take several relatively strong solar cycles to restore global temperatures to what they were before the first of the weak cycles. This is the nightmare scenario as a one or two degree reduction in global temperatures is likely to make it very difficult to grow sufficient food to feed the human race at current levels – never mind the level projected by mid-century.

Satellite data is approaching 40 years. Unfortunately, NASA ate the first 6 years, so we are now stuck with 34 years. Of that, 50% show an upward trend, and 50% show a flat trend. Based upon ground reading “proxies” we know that prior to the satellite data, the trend was negative. So what we have is really no trend. Up, down even is not a trend. It is a kids game.

Pause implies that temperature will resume an upward trend. No one knows that for sure. Temperatures might drop just like they did starting in 1944, but the important thing is that pause or flat spot, the models didn’t predict or project it. The models didn’t predict the 1998 spike either. In other words, the models were wrong then and they are wrong today. There is no reason to believe the models will be right 100 years from now.

Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm
So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up.
————————————–
So that means there is no other answer but that 1 part in 20,000 of the atmosphere changing from something to CO2 is what caused an “unprecedented” .4C rise in temp? Is that the only possible factor that could have caused temps to rise .6C during the past 85 years? What caused the rise in temp from 1910 to 1940? What caused the .3C drop in temp from 1880 to 1910? It is completely absurd what has happened to Science! It has been murdered.
The Met Office, (Key contributor to IPCC) confirms the RSS data.

Rob Dawg says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:00 pm
…
We saw a spike in temps culminating with 1998.

Not really. There was a spike in about 1997-8, a one-time ENSO step change. There is no justification for associating the previous 1979-1996 period with it. Statistical jiggery-pokery, aka end-point selectrion fallacy. So the entire warming model is based on an un-anticipated, unexplained 2-year change, not even a brief 20-year “trend”. Then with a bit of parametrical prestidigitation ….

Of course lack of correlation implies absence of causation. Doesn’t prove but most certainly implies. Importantly it places the onus on the proponents to demonstrate why the hypothesis has not been falsified by the lack of correlation.

In other words, the shoe is on the other foot. The lack of warming is strong evidence that AGW is a failed theory. Not that it needs some tweaking. Rather that it has failed, it that it completely failed to predict what has now been observed.

” would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.”
Well Gareth I think it’s all due to natural variation – please direct me to the scientific research listing and quantifying all the factors which caused the earth to move in and out of ice ages in the pre-industrial era. To one decimal place would be fine thanks.

Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm
So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up.
==============
Temps have been rising since the time of the French revolution. No doubt a result of the introduction of the fossil fueled Madame La Guillotine. Or maybe it was the blood of the aristo’s that so upset the gods in heaven that they are slowly roasting us in hell. Like frogs in a giant stew pot, the heat is rising so slowly that none notice.

MACK1 says:
December 16, 2013 at 5:38 pm
please direct me to the scientific research listing and quantifying all the factors which caused the earth to move in and out of ice ages in the pre-industrial era.
============
How about a single climate model that can reliably recreate the Medieval, Roman, Minoan, and previous Holocene warnings, without the need to selectively employ volcanoes as the universal explanation.

… By “media response,” I do not mean another interview with Alarmists who repeat the same dogma. I mean an honest statement by the media of the criteria that they use to judge statements by Alarmists.
—
What makes you think that they use any criteria at all? The quality of science reporting in the mainstream media has hit rock bottom – not just for climate science, but for any field of science. There is virtually no news item in my own field (biomedicine) that will not make me cringe and groan, usually with some outlandish claims of “new therapies” that are just around the corner.

Very rarely does one see a science news item nowadays that is not just copied from a press release by some research organization or other interested party. The media simply don’t seem to have any people left with an actual scientific understanding – they just supply a megaphone that will amplify any sound from whichever bodily orifice it is attached to. This, in turn, has encouraged the interested parties to become ever more brazen in their claims and self-serving in their hyperbolic mental flatulence.

Academia, as an institution, has come to cynically abuse its supposed monopoly on humanity’s redemption much in the same way as the catholic church did before the protestant reformation. That reformation was about the people taking back their Christian faith from a church that had proven unfit to maintain it. Today, the people need to take science. Just as the catholic church needed the threat of reformation to mend its ways, academia today needs a vigorous challenge by an informed public. WUWT and similar venues have a greater role to play in this than the media.

Theo Goodwin says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:48 pm
.
.
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… Do remember to take some prescription vitamin D supplements. You are way up there. You are as far north as Latvia.
——-
Never take prescription vitamin D!!! That is the patent drug, vitamin D2 made from fungi, which is essentially nonfunctional in animals. Take OTC (in the uS et al) vitamin D3, the natural animal form, at about 5000 iu/day.

Of course, 9 years is not considered relevant if you are a true believer. However, when put in the context above we see only a small warming followed by a small cooling over the 17 years. Even the small warming was much less than predicted.

In addition, both hadcrut4 and GISS also show cooling from 2005. We are in ENSO neutral conditions. There is absolutely no reason for the planet to be cooler than models predict if they have the science right.

Keep in mind that the RSS trend from 1996.5 is only .00045C/year. If December continues the current downward slide we could be close to 17 years and 6 months when the next RSS data is released. However, without some real strong cooling this addition of multiple months will eventually come to an end. 1995 ended with a La Nina and before that we had Pinatubo.

Responding to :Gareth Phillips said on December 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm
“So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.”

The Minoan warm period was warmer than the Roman Warm Period, which was warmer than the Medieval Warm period, which was warmer than now. The cycles of warmer and colder periods is on a cooling trend, which is consistent with the records for earlier inter-glacials.

You raise an excellent point (several, in fact). We not only need to take back science but take public reporting, as well. Perhaps our protests should not be (only) at the gates of government buildings but at MSM offices, and perhaps a few Universities too.

Clearly they don’t yet understand that we don’t like being lied to, we don’t like being robbed and we don’t like being blamed for things that are perfectly natural.

As for the word “implies” (used elsewhere), it’s amazing how Catastrophists love to hide behind that word and similar and understand them very clearly when looking for a loophole to escape through, yet refuse to see it at all when used by someone else.

Christopher? An excellent article, I enjoy your observations very much, and I’m having a great time with the comments. Thank you.

Lord Monckton–Five years ago I attended my daughter’s graduation from the University of Glasgow–December 2008. My husband had told me that December was mild and I did not need any heavy clothes. That year it was cold and snowy in the first week in December, and I was out buying warmer clothes just to get through the week. Glad I was not there for February!! And I am glad it is mild for you this year. We in Kansas are enjoying a very cold December so far. No warming here to speak of. The 1930s heat and drought have set records that have not been broken yet.

Doesn’t anthropogenic CO2 have a half life of 4 years? While the rise we’re seeing now requires a half life of at least 30 years? So humans can’t be the cause of the CO2 rise regardless of its effects. We contribute 4% I think. And the effects have exponentially diminishing (aka logarithmic) returns.

In response to Monckton’s “Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”

Uh? So, he’s almost right by saying exactly what you say is right and not saying what you’re saying is almost right?

Lord Monckton is absolutely right, causation without correlation is possible but it does necessarily imply otherwise. Decorrelation is evdidence of a non-causal relationship although not conclusive like correlation is evidence of a causal relationship although not conclusive.

“Yet it ought to be having some effect. All other things being equal…”

But all other things are not equal.

Strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation depends on radiative cooling at altitude allowing subsidence of air masses. It is this circulation that pneumatically produces the lapse rate observed below the tropopause. Without radiative gases, strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation would stall and the atmosphere would trend isothermal. The temperature of the resulting isothermal atmosphere would be driven by surface Tmax not surface Tav.

Now look at the original “basic physics” of the “settled science”. They assume that the troposphere will still exhibit strong vertical circulation and a strong lapse rate in the absence of radiative gases. They then use an incorrectly calculated* surface Tav to calculate the temperature of this theoretical non-radiative atmosphere. They calculated changes in radiative flux only, without simultaneously solving for changing speed of mechanical energy transport for changing concentrations of radiative gases. They got it wrong.

Viscount Monckton writes –

“Maybe the models got the forcing wrong, or the feedbacks wrong, or the climate-sensitivity parameter wrong, or the amplification equation wrong, or the non-radiative transports wrong.”

Failing to correctly model the non-radiative transports, or the changes in these energy transports with changing radiative gas concentrations correctly, is the critical error in the radiative greenhouse hypothesis.

*Surface Tav under a non-radiative atmosphere has also been modelled incorrectly by climate “scientists”. They assumed that downwelling LWIR has the same effect over the oceans as land. However liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool cannot be heated nor have its cooling rate slowed by incident LWIR. That means no “snowball earth” and no “heat hiding in the oceans”

It is not just the AGW hypothesis that is in error , but its foundation, the radiative greenhouse hypothesis. The null hypothesis still stands for both.

But what is the null hypothesis for the radiative greenhouse effect? The hypothesis claims you can solve for atmospheric temperature by applying SB equations to a moving gas atmosphere over a liquid water ocean. The null hypothesis is “radiative flux equations used alone won’t do it”. The null hypothesis stands.

I must say it must be very painful to those who ,willfully or not, accepted the indoctrination into AGW.

It must be like watching a loved one pass as an inoperable cancer slowly metastasizes their life away in a digital world.

I do feel for them.

Ok , I am over it.

Hopefully we will soon see lawmakers react to factual observation and not failing models. The economies of the world, let alone the population, need the change. Punative energy policy does have negative feedbacks associated with such.

Lord Monckton wrote, “Yet the spavined nag on which they had bet the ranch fell at the first fence.”

You know the saying, You can lead a horse to water vapor, but you can’t make them think.”… or something to that effect…

The bed-wetters (as Lord Monckton appropriately names them) have adroitly propagandized the masses into believing the non-nullifiable notion of “Climate Change”, where any weather event is evidence of CAGW: too much rain=CAGW, too little rain=CAGW, no snow=CAGW, record snow=CAGW, record cold temps=CAGW, lack of severe weather=CAGW, record Antarctic Ice Extents=CAGW, record Arctic Ice recovery=CAGW, etc.

“Climate Change” has become like the mythical Greek monster Hydra, where every head Hercules would cut off, two heads would take its place… Hercules eventually defeated the beast by cauterizing each head stump with Hydra’s own poisonous blood and eventually lobbing off Hydra’s last remaining immortal head…

CAGW skeptics are now finally in the process of cauterizing each of the bed-wetter’s scary heads with their own poisonous empirical evidence. CAGW’s god Hera will occasionally send a giant crab (lost heat hiding in the ocean depths, for example) to distract the skeptics and gain some time, but the bed-wetters are quickly running out of both scary giant crabs and scary heads.

UnfrozenCavemanMD says:
December 16, 2013 at 6:02 pmMoving the goal post to 20 years in 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 …
It is already too late for NOAA with their 95% criteria. According to SkS, for their two sigma numbers, we cannot rule out a zero slope since July, 1989, or a period of over 24 years.
According to Nick Stokes’ site, it is since December, 1992 that the warming is not statistically significant. This is exactly 21 years. However neither site has the November numbers yet so an extra month could possibly be added to each.

Well, kind of, sort of true: lack of correlation may result from lack of statistical power, range of variation, linearity. However, once significant rigorous effort has been invested to address those concerns, then it certainly begins to look like absence of correlation implies absence of causation.

Unfortunately, it’s devastating to compare Steven’s intellectual arguments with those from Bob Tisdale. That I know of, Steven has never articulated intellectual argument on WUWT (I may have missed one) – he simply give links to irrelevant or inarticulate websites.

I guess he’s our pet troll, so we tolerate this trivia and waste time responding to zero-value-add statements. The term “…nailing Jell-o to a wall…” comes to mind.

I’m not feeling so bad now that I didn’t finish high school these days. I went on NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center web site and looked up the continental US for the twentieth century by decade.
1901 through 1910 had an average temperature of 51.72 (F).
This varies as the century went along with figures by decade of 51.33, 52.01, 52.69, 52.09, 52.15, 51.75, 51.80, 51.46, ending the century in 1991 through 2000 with a huge heat surge of 52.83.
So, the last decade of the twentieth century was a massive 0..26 degree F over the very toasty 40’s. Where was the panic in 1949? Oops, it dropped back to 51.46 by the 80’s.
Anthropogenic Global Warming has to be the biggest semi science sociolagic fraud in the history of the world.

Shakespeare had it right… “much ado about nothing”. Arguing about an averaged line moving within the statistical margin of error is, by definition, insane. AGW has never existed, nor will it ever as long as there are plants, oceans, and an atmosphere on this planet.

And I went unto the Warmists and said Fear Not! For the CO2 is logarithmic and the T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics.

And They mocked me and said Have you not seen the Tree Rings?

What hath Tree Rings to do with the Physics I asked of them. And they said if I did not know I was a fool.

And so I came to look upon the Tree Rings and they were false. For they did not foretell the instrumental record for near half its course, and this the Warmists tried to Hide. And when it came to pass that only a Single Tree spoke of what they said, I said again, Fear Not, for CO2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics.

And they mocked me and said that the seas would rise up with increasing fury.

What hath Sea Level Rise to do with the Physics I asked of them. And they said if I did not know I was a fool.

And so I came to look upon the Sea Level Rise and lo it was steady over the course of the data. Why has one among you purchased at much cost a monstrous house next to the Sea you say will rise up I asked. Have you, like me, understood that CO2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics?

And they mocked me and said that the ice was melting and this was a harbinger of doom.

What hath ice melting at one tiny part of the world to do with the Physics I asked of them. And they said if I did not know I was a fool.

And so I came to look upon the Sea Ice and lo, while that of the North was Melting, that of the South was Growing. And as I said this unto Them, lo, the North began to grow also. You who have proclaimed the far reaches of the earth the only safe haven from the coming Heat have no emigrated to those lands, nor procured property there, do you, as I, Fear Not for CO2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics?

Thunderbolts and Lightning! Very Very Frightening! The droughts and the hurricanes shall smite us!

What hath droughts and hurricanes to do with the Physics as asked of them, hopeless now because I already knew it was I who was the fool.

And so I came to look upon the droughts and found them unchanged. And I looked upon the hurricanes and found them to be in decline. And I said again Fear Not for the CO2 is logarithmic and they interrupted me and mocked me.

You are a fool they said, for you are not a climate scientist, and so you do not understand. And I said unto them, Other than the collecting of the Data from Trees and Satellites and other such complex tasks, what skills beyond first year physics and statistics are required to analyse Them? And they Refused to Answer and the Anth_ny did Ban them until such time as they should Answer and then they became Abusive and the Anth_ny banned them forever.

But still others took up the Cause and said Lo, the Heat is hiding in places where we cannot see it, and it shall someday spring forth upon us and smite us.

And I could not look upon those places where none could see and so I asked how this springing forth could happen, by what mechanism of Physics could this occur?

And for this They have no Answer.

Fear Not I said, for Co2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics.

And they spoke among themselves and said we must find a new means by which to prophecy doom. We shall search and search for such a means, but under no circumstance will we discuss the Physics.

Normally I argue for people to cut Steven Mosher slack, but not tonight.

Steven, while correlation does not necessarily indicate causation, causation necessarily indicates correlation, a conditional statement is logically equivalent to its contrapositive.

Knowing perfectly well that you’re not a simpleton, I’m highly confident that what I’m talking about isn’t what you mean, and that somehow this is not relevant. Unfortunately for simpletons like myself in the audience, I’m utterly unable to deduce what that ‘somehow’ might be from your response. If you’re going to go to the trouble to post at all, couldn’t you elucidate just a little further than that?

whither went BBC Business Daily’s report on IEA’s King Coal report? BBC’s audio online has other items from last nite’s show, but not the reality-based interview with van der Hoeven, in which she re-emphasised that additional coal production capacity of a half‐million tonnes per annum will be added EACH DAY until 2018:

16 Dec: Paris: IEA: Remarks by Maria van der Hoeven at Launch of the Medium‐Term Coal Market Report 2013
And yet no fuel is as responsible for powering the economic growth that has pulled billions out of poverty in the past decades…
***Over the next six years, additional coal production capacity of a half‐million tonnes per annum will be added worldwide … each day. That will be necessary to meet a worldwide demand increase of 2.3% per year on average until 2018.
And while it is true that demand growth is concentrated in non‐OECD countries, coal does not decline in the OECD…
And in China, the scale of coal in the economy is simply incomparable to fuels elsewhere. Replacing coal with gas in Chinese power generation would require twice the volume of all global LNG trade.
Coal therefore continues to play an important role in economic growth and energy security worldwide…
Progress on CCS is effectively stalled, and a meaningful carbon price is missing.http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/speeches/131206MCMR2013LaunchRemarks.pdf

NYT disappeared their story too, by using the old coal URL but turning it into an oil story, courtesty of EIA, as opposed to IEA, which they only mention 7 paras into the story:

16 Dec: InsideClimateNews: NYT: IEA Report: Global Coal Use Predicted to Keep Growing
Global consumption of coal, a major source of the greenhouse gases blamed for rising global temperatures and other pollutants, is likely to continue to grow at “a relentless pace” through 2018, according to a report by the International Energy Agency.
“Like it or not, coal is here to stay for a long time to come,” said Maria van der Hoeven, the agency’s executive director, in a statement…LINKhttp://insideclimatenews.org/todaysnews/20131216/iea-report-global-coal-use-predicted-keep-growing

The rant continues.
I certainly get it if it’s not worth Steven’s time to explain this, but in this case why was it worth Steven’s time to post the single word wrong in the first place? If we presume that the point of posting is to communicate something (and perhaps we are foolish to make such assumptions, since apparently we’re wrong even to assume that causation implies correlation), what was the intent of the communication? It seems the point was to tell us we are wrong without explaining why. In general I don’t see much point in paying attention to people who find value in crappy games like that. That’s just plain wrong.
Okay. I’m done venting now.

The average anomaly so far for the first 11 months is 0.224 which would rank it 9th or 10th for the year. It should be noted that this year was neutral in terms of ENSO so no one can use the excuse that if we had only properly accounted for ENSO, we would see an increase. Judging by the area under the zero line and between the September 1996 to December 1997 anomalies, it would take a strong El Nino to reduce the time to under 17 years. CO2 alone or even a weak El Nino are just not up to it.

I for one expect warming to continue, as it has with some interruptions for the last 10,000 years. Glaciers may also retreat as they have for millenia – 10,000 years ago the place where I sit was under 1000 feet of ice. The 17 year pause does not disprove long-term warming, but it does completely undermine the models on which much of the current (contrived) (so-called) “consensus” is based.

I’ll also be on the record to say that I wish mankind would stop burning so much fossil fuel, just because it would be nice to leave some for future generations. I know, I know that all that extra CO2 is good for the forests, but let’s not be greedy about it.

Always a pleasure to read what you’ve got to say. I’d be much more enthusiastic about your argument if you could help me grasp what’s wrong with this common rebuttal. Immediately after pointing out that atmospheric temperatures have been flat and suggesting that the missing energy is not in fact hiding in the ocean, my warmist colleague invariably looks at me with pity and asks how it is the oceans are still rising if energy isn’t collecting in the system. If it’s not thermal expansion, and it’s not melting ice, because both of those require energy, what exactly do I propose is the explanation.
And I shut up at that point, because I have no answer. I guess I could concoct an argument about aquifiers adding previously trapped water to the system, but I don’t honestly believe this accounts for the problem myself.
If you have an argument that refutes this rebuttal I’d be delighted if you’d share it with me.
Best regards and thanks for your post.

Mark Bofill says: December 16, 2013 at 7:51 pm
It seems the point was to tell us we are wrong without explaining why.
causation can exist when correlation is zero. The upshot of these two facts is that, in general and without additional information, correlation reveals literally nothing about causation. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for it.
==========================================================
You’re right and Mosher was correct…..Rude? yep…. http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/causation-without-correlation-is-possible/

So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.”

So great are the uncertainties in the instrumental temperature record, that if we were to use the instrumental temperature record alone with no other lines of evidence, nobody can tell by how much global surface temperatures have changed since about 1850. On the basis of the instrumental temperature record alone, it is possible that that global surface temperatures have been flat for more than 100 years. I know that this proposition is utter heresy even at WUWT. But can anyone prove me wrong?

Weasel words: what does “necessarily implies” here mean exactly? It can’t mean “proves”, as some hysteresis effect could form the explanation. And what is the “game” – the physics makes clear that temperatures will rise logarithmically with increased CO2 concentration: is it that (through negative feedbacks) the rise will just be minimal, or that it will eventually self-correct – or that there is some other cyclical effect in progress?

However, this does implicitly reverse the null hypothesis: scientific method requires the warmists to state a falsifiable hypothesis which they never seem to do – showing that this is all truly about politics rather than science. And in politics reason goes out of the window … sigh.

To believe some of the comments as genuine, you would think this was bad news.
Of course there are those who stand to lose out financially as the CAGW hysteria recedes but there are also, as Richard Lindzen put it four years ago, “… numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake”: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria/.

Always a pleasure to read what you’ve got to say. I’d be much more enthusiastic about your argument if you could help me grasp what’s wrong with this common rebuttal. Immediately after pointing out that atmospheric temperatures have been flat and suggesting that the missing energy is not in fact hiding in the ocean, my warmist colleague invariably looks at me with pity and asks how it is the oceans are still rising if energy isn’t collecting in the system. If it’s not thermal expansion, and it’s not melting ice, because both of those require energy, what exactly do I propose is the explanation.
—

Perhaps you can point out to your colleague that sea levels are not in fact rising. Perhaps you can actually investigate your colleague’s claims before admitting defeat. Perhaps you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Wrong just because, id like to hear his wrong explained but I am forced assume that was just a childish reaction. We all understand the causation promoted co2 to temperature but since the beginning of this global warming thing, many have disagreed fully with it. After 17 years of listening/ reading reports and statements of impending doom with no data to support it its really amusing to watch the AGW scramble for explanations. But I’m still greatly saddened at the wasted time and billions of dollars spent killing economies and not doing actual science. Proving something wrong is science, hanging on tooth and nail to a false claim is not.

Not sure how BOM temperature measurement compares with UAH satellite data – perhaps Jonova can organise another comparison. But I have no doubt that come January, no matter how cold it is in Chicago, Australians we will read about every record under the sun being broken in 2013.

And the BOM even has an explanation for the recent cooler years in that they were wet and warmer than previous wet years:

“Another feature of recent climate in Australia is that background trends have continued; in the case of temperature, the warming trend is adding a warming bias to the natural variability. This was apparent even during the two recent La Niña years. While late 2010 through early 2012 were slightly cooler than the 1961–1990 average, the period was warmer than comparable wet periods of the past, such as those which occurred during the 1970s and 1950s. In other words, while the temperatures were below average, the warming trend held the values higher than they should have been without the trend, given the amount of rain that fell.

The warming trend over Australia now means that, in the absence of year-to-year natural variability, a calendar year can be expected to be (on average) around +0.35 °C above the 1961–1990 base period, or about 0.9 °C warmer than the temperatures during the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Every year – wet, dry or with near average rainfall – is affected by this warming trend which favours the occurrence of abnormally hot years, and a reduction in the number of cool years. This is most obviously seen at the annual time scale where typically only one year in ten is now cooler than average.”

True Me Lud?

Or will forever:

Again rejoicing Nature sees
Her robe assume its vernal hues:
Her leafy locks wave in the breeze,
All freshly steep’d in morning dews.

“Actually, Gareth, the long term trend is down” …
“The Minoan warm period was warmer than the Roman Warm Period, which was warmer than the Medieval Warm period, which was warmer than now.”

I tried splicing HadCrut3 onto Loehle’s self-corrected global temperature reconstruction, and got the 1998-onward era being slightly warmer than the warmest 30 year period of the Medieval Warm Period. With Roman coins being recently exposed where glaciers retreated, it seems that that level of thawing of those glaciers is the greatest since the Roman Warm Period.

If not for CO2, the world would be cooler now than it is. CO2 is having an effect, but not as much as claimed by those claiming it has an effect. The models are tweaked to attribute all of the warming from the early 1970s to the 2004-2005 peak of smoothed HadCRUT3 to increase of greenhouse gases. However, a look at smoothed HadCRUT3 shows a periodic cycle that explains almost half the warmup from the early 1970s to 2004-2005, mostly before mid-2001. The periodic cycle explains why despite rising CO2, according to HadCRUT3 with some smoothing, global temperature has fallen slightly from 2004-2005 to where it was in mid-2001.

“So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet”

Nice strawman. The whole point of the article is not that temps have fallen; it is that they have not risen for over 15 years, contrary to the models and various other predictions that they would.

Alarmists are now scurrying to dream up reasons why, attempting to weasel out of their failed predictions, diverting attention away from the failed predictions by making silly strawman arguments, and changing the language to “climate change”.

They’re serving only to make themselves look increasingly stupid, when they might have actually saved face by being real scientists who admit to being wrong.

Mosher hits and runs, offering no value once again. Thank you Steven.Almost as coherent as your “The data is crap,” but after we the BEST crew, dice it up and mix it around it is not manure?
David Hoffer 7:17 thank you sir that is a keeper, should be read at any climate mitigation talk fests.

“WattsUpWithThat is just about the only place where you will be allowed to see this or any graph showing the spectacularly zero trend line…” and yet there is STILL the BELIEF here that CO2 MUST cause SOME warming. The EVIDENCE, as you have just pointed out, falsifies that belief. Time now to drop it, and at the very least, allow the ‘zero sensitivity to CO2’ hypothesis to be scientifically examined, and not reject it and deny it because of nothing more than personal pride.

Even RSS shows warming at the 95% level since 1980, but would it show warming at the 5 sigma level that was wanted for the Higgs particle? So I guess my counter question to you is what level of certainty do you want? I certainly would not be able to figure it out, but perhaps Nick Stokes could answer your question as to how sure we are that warming has taken place since 1850. However even if we can be 100% sure warming has taken place, that would not indicate what fraction of that warming was due to human produced CO2.

No amount of time will convince you the models are crap or that the AGW hypothesis is seriously screwed up…
+++++++++
No no… according to Steven Mosher, it’s not the models that are crap, the correct statement from Steven Mosher is “There is the raw data if you like crap.”

I think I know what he was trying to say, but can only take him at his word. If the models give the wrong answer, it must be because everything else is wrong. Models are more real that —uhm reality.

Mark Bofill;
my warmist colleague invariably looks at me with pity and asks how it is the oceans are still rising if energy isn’t collecting in the system.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Ask your colleague this. If CO2 is warming up the earth, how does it manage to warm up the ocean WITHOUT warming up either the land surface or the sea surface? Does it go straight to jail? Do not pass Go?

The earth has been in a cooling trend since about 2003 which will likely continue until 2035 and perhaps for hundreds of years beyond that. The IPCC models are structured wrongly and what is more have no inherent predictive skill. A new forecasting paradigm is required . For such a method and for the timing and amount of the coming cooling and links to the basic data on which the forecasts are made see several posts at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com

Mark Bofill says:December 16, 2013 at 8:23 pm
… how it is the oceans are still rising if energy isn’t collecting in the system. If it’s not thermal expansion, and it’s not melting ice, because both of those require energy, what exactly do I propose is the explanation.

– – –
Roughly, Sea levels have risen 120 m since the last ice age. They are rising today at about the same rate as they have been when CO2 was lower in the past. One can not attribute todays rise to anthropological causes while dismissing the natural 120m rise in the somewhat recent past.
Also, there are recent articles here on WUWT about current sea level rise trends and measurements that you should read.

Michael D The earth has been cooling in general since about 8000 years BP see Fig 4 at the last post at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot,com
For those readers who believe that CO2 is the main climate driver the data in the same Fig4 shows that CO2 is obviously a coolant or ice house gas.

Let P(t) be some periodic function, say P(t) = sin(t) + 2sin(3t). Let L(t) be some linear function with a small but positive slope, say L(t)= t/10. Let F(t) = P(t) + L(t). Plot F(t) from 0 to 100 on your favorite online graphing calculator. (Just Google to find one.) Over short time spans there is very little correlation between L(t) and F(t). Yet, over the long run, L(t) is the dominate feature.

Now, it is true that climate scientists do not understand P(t) as well as they thought they did. They did not predict the pause and they did not predict the rapid warming of the Arctic. There will likely be other surprises ahead. But L(t) is the dominate feature over time – with some uncertainty in the slope..This is well understood physical science.

Felix;
They did not predict the pause and they did not predict the rapid warming of the Arctic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Seriously? All that screaming that about arctic amplification and and and an ice free arctic was about the Arctic not warming rapidly? Are you new to this debate? Like, still in the wrapper?

Felix;
But L(t) is the dominate feature over time – with some uncertainty in the slope..This is well understood physical science.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Again, seriously? When temps were rising in the 80’s and 90’s skeptics were ridiculed for pointing out that they were well within natural variability. No way was natural variability large enough to account for the changes in temperature. Now that temps are NOT rising, suddenly natural variability is big enough to affect the trend after all. Could your crowd pick a position and stick with it?

Whither Went the Warmer Weather?
Apparently it went over to Phys.Org. As at July 3 this year, John Heilprin was reporting “UN says 2001-2010 decade shows faster warming trend”

Global warming accelerated since the 1970s and broke more countries’ temperature records than ever before in the first decade of the new millennium, U.N. climate experts said Wednesday.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-decade-faster-trend.html#jCp
He has an alarming photo, captioned “People stand on roofs as their homes are seen inundated by floodwaters in Vijaywada, about 270 kilometers (169 miles) southeast from Hyderabad, India, Friday, Sept. 23, 2005. Health workers distributed food, medicine and drinking water Friday”

My statement that absence of correlation for 17 years 3 months between CO2 and temperature datasets necessarily implies absence of causation between them has drawn some specious challenges, one from the relentlessly uninformative Mosher, another based on the relentlessly unreliable Wikipedia, another based on the relentlessly trivial fact that over some periods >17 years one can identify a rising trend in both CO2 and temperature.

So let me provide a formal demonstration of the proposition that, since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. That proposition is known as an implication.

If the statement that correlation exists is p and the statement that causation exists is q then the premise that correlation does not necessarily imply causation is written NOT (p IMP q), and the conclusion that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation is written “NOT p IMP NOT q”.

Recall the truth-table for any “p IMP q”. If p is true and q false then p IMP q is false, otherwise p IMP q is true.

The truth table for [NOT (p IMP q)] IMP (NOT p IMP NOT q) is identical to the truth-table for an implication. Q.E.D.

Mr. Bofill asks why sea level is rising if there is no net energy gain in the coupled ocean-atmosphere object. I refer him to Peltier (2009), who found sea level falling somewhat on the basis of gravitational-anomaly measurements, or to the entire 8-year record of the now-failed Envisat satellite, which used laser altimetry to show sea level rising at 1.3 inches/century from 2004-2012, or to Professor Niklas Mörner’s excellent paper of 2011 entitled “Sea Level Is Not Rising”. The title says it all.

2) a) When you run the numbers and show that there’s no economic benefit from a megapoject, the promoter invents non-existant “hidden economic benefits” to skew the numbers.
2) b) When you run the numbers and show that there’s no global warming for the past decade or two, the CAGW type invents non-existant “hidden warming” to skew the numbers.

Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. Game over, logically speaking.
You can’t say so , it may imply multiple causations…CO2 is merely a factor among others

ANd The inventiveness with which They wriggle is impressive. Maybe all that air pollution from China is like a parasol. Maybe the warming somehow snuck sneakily past the upper 2000 feet of the ocean so that it didn’t notice, and perhaps it’s lurking in the benthic strata where we can’t measure it. Maybe it’s just waiting to come out when we least expect it and say, “Boo!”

yes that could be valid explanations be true, the problem is they said “science is settled”.

Actually, Gareth, the long term trend is down ..
[…]
The Minoan warm period was warmer than the Roman Warm Period, which was warmer than the Medieval Warm period, which was warmer than now. The cycles of warmer and colder periods is on a cooling trend, which is consistent with the records for earlier inter-glacials.

If anything, we are on the way into the next glacial phase.

Alex
—————————————————————————————————————

The historic long term trend is even more “down” than that. Over the past 4.5 billion years or so, the Earth has cooled from a ball of molten rock into a habitable planet.

More than that, the future long term trend can absolutely be guaranteed to be down. Sooner or later the Sun will die and, assuming the Earth isn’t eaten in the fireball, it will become very, very, cold indeed. ;)

Anthony, I encourage you to update the ‘Climate Fail’ section of your site to reflect the definitely broken state of climate models.
Perhaps some view of the Arctic showing the still-extant ice-caps would also be of use.
I know its easier to have me suggest what you ought to do, than it is for you to do it. I apologise for that.

News media only like bad news. So, the fact CO2 is nothing like the problem it was thought isn’t news.

The real impact of this has been to undermine the credibility of those people who call themselves “scientists”. I suspect that the caricature of the scientist in holywood is going to change from the “mad-professor” who is on the verge of insanity but extremely clever … to the TOTALLY MAD-professor who believes in all kinds of nonsense like Aliens, global warming, ESP, etc, who not only misunderstands society but also misunderstands what used to be called “science”.

I accept Lord Monckton’s conclusions. As a self taught layman I have a theoretical question; What would be the equilibrium temperature of a black body permanently irradiated by long wave IR in the range 13 to 17 microns?

AGW theory says a rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will raise air temperatures. This theory is “evidenced” by the production of numerous models which predicted a rise in air temperatures. This is causation, and over time frames which the proponents developed – not the skeptics.

Despite clear data manipulation, we see no rise in air temperatures within the allowed timescales. The predictions have failed.

The onus is therefore on the proponents of the the theory to explain why the causation is not occurring. It is not enough to say that lack of correlation does not invalidate their theory.

Mark Bofill says:
December 16, 2013 at 8:23 pm
(Re. Mark’s comment about the oceans still rising.)
Mark over 60 percent of the tide gauges show lowering or flat sea levels. (Per a recent paper they estimate 1mm per year, which, when it comes to the incredibly complicated measuring of sea level is not different then zero. (For over two decades geologist argued, and some still do, about the existence of the Palmdale bulge, hotly debating the claimed existence of a 300 mm bulge in the Southern California desert, which, after all, should be orders of magnitude simpler then measuring a one to three mm rise in the global oceans)

The satellite trend has been adjusted repeatedly, and like the land based T reading, the adjustment is towards raising the previous trend. Just when the trends were flattening, they were pulled off line for months, and new metrics were included such as the isotactic adjustment for the presumption of lowering sea beds. I suggest you can familiarize yourself with this and then ask the alarmists a question.

Ask them how the increased heat from CO2 all went into the atmosphere from 1980 until 1998, and the suddenly decided to bypass, not only the atmosphere, but the first 700 meters of ocean?

If their FUBAR logic has them still making detailed arguments, remind that that even if they are correct, the claimed “warming” in the oceans and or atmosphere, is still only about one third of what the models predicted, and likely to continue to be beneficial to humans. The “C” is entirely missing from CAGW. (Neither Nick or Mosher will engage in this subject) Truthfully the GW has always been missing, (The SH and tropics barely warmed at all) the W is now absent for 17 years, and the “A” is a theory with only simplistic support in a complex world. So remind me why we wish to destroy the worlds economy and submit to global government?

PS, actually Mr. Mosher will not engage on any subject, as he is clearly above reasoned debate.

Really people? All the long winded responses to Mosh’s “wrong”.
Here’s the appropriate response to Mosh’s assertion.

LOL@ Mosh!!!!! :D Well, jorgekafkazar, got it pretty much right, too. Or, we can start a meme ….. look at all those causes running amok!!! They’re correlated to nothing and is caused by the nothings!!!!

Within the context of the article I side with Monckton rather than Mosher. However, is it true generally?

An example is where one variable increases but another suddenly changes. For example, reducing temperature of water and the formation of ice. If we drop the temperature of water from 20C to 5C and measure the amount of ice, we will find a lack of correlation. But does that mean that change in temperature does not cause ice to form?

Not generally, but it does within the context of the range of temperatures being considered.

What if we measured something so small that it was dominated by noise? E.g. according to relativity a watch in a car should vary. So, I check my watch, drive around the world, and then compare it to the clock in the house. The two are extremely likely to have varied one with respect to the other – but due to tolerances in the timekeeping of the watch and not due to relativity, so I repeat with a car load of clocks and a house full of clocks. I obtain a huge statistical variation, but it is much larger than the change I’m trying to measure, but the statistical change happens to falsify the predicted outcome.

Does this disprove relativity? No. Could I say: “travelling in a car causes time to change”?

Theoretically it does, but practically (i.e. within the contexts of the measurements being taken) it does not.

However, the crux, is that we are not trying to disprove something that is proven, but instead questioning whether it is proven in the first place. In such a situation, in science, the null hypothesis always wins unless or until evidence proves otherwise. So, in terms of proposing a scientific theory, unless or until evidence shows otherwise, then a lack of correlation logically does force us to a conclusion that there is a lack of correlation (unless or until there is overwhelming evidence by some other avenue).

So, e.g. we have good reason to believe that CO2 has a particular spectral response deemed the “greenhouse effect”. A lack of correlation of temperature and CO2 does not disprove this link, however … if we take into account the expected greenhouse effect of CO2 which suggests warming of about 0.05/decade (?) … then we have actually seen about 0.085C COOLING over the last 17 years

So, if we only consider the theory of enhanced warming from feedbacks, the theory says there should have been warming over the last 17 years. Instead there has been substantial cooling. As such, if “the science is settled” with the greenhouse effect of CO2, it is “settled” that the theory of enhanced feedbacks has been shown to be false.

Samurai: nice comparison with the hydra. The bed wetters are about to discover that their settled science is wrong because only a false theory implies everything. They must have noted that when its name had to be changed from warming into change and their opponents had to be called ‘change deniers’. Because change has about the same meaning as time, the name had to be made scary by the introduction of extremes, making it possible to exploit weird weather events as a last resort. It’s a big joke but a tragedy for the faithful. It’s their hydra, not ours.

1. There is a world of difference between AGW and CAGW. AGW is almost certainly real, but a minor, mildly interesting phenomenon, maybe partly caused by rising CO2 levels., and/or increased irrigation, and/or UHI, and/or etc. While CAGW is a fantasy which alarmists promote and their models are pre=programmed to predict. The alarmists like to muddle up the two subjects and so do far too many sceptics.

2. Thank heavens for the satellite data like RSS. Can you imagine what the GISS data would look like now without the satellite data to keep it at least partly honest?

Mark Bofill says “my warmist colleague invariably looks at me with pity and asks how it is the oceans are still rising if energy isn’t collecting in the system”.

The oceans have been rising for millenia due to water run-off from (land-based) ice following the last ice age, after which temperatures stabilised at normal inter-glacial levels.

There is still a long way to go in this: the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are still with us, and will still be melting for millennia – so MSLs will continue to rise.

But it is not this constant run-off, giving constant rise in MSL, which indicates energy “collecting in the system”. If energy is collecting” (so temperatures are rising) the ice run-off rate would be increasing and we would see an *acceleration* in MSL rise – not just a constant rise.

I’m going to play advocatus diaboli here:
Looking at the graph, 1978 was clearly an anomaly and including it leaves one open to charges of ‘cherry-picking’. Leaving that out gives a total of 12 years with no warming, according to global temperature datasets.
BUT.
Trying to quote an average temperature is a fool’s game. With sufficiently precise thermometers you will find differences between different volumes of a room, let alone the entire bloody atmosphere. What’s the ‘average’, then? SInce the AGW hypothesis proposes that the whole planet is heating up, that must apply to the majority of localations within it. So we don’t need an average temperature for the globe, with all the errors that implies, we simply need to look at trends in each location. Anthony’s surfacestations.org allows us (for the USA) to look at siting problems like urbanisation, etc. So those stations can be removed. Likewise any at airports, where the increase in jet aviation and the fact that temperature sensors only record a maximum and minimum for each day (meaning that a quick swipe of jet exhaust can easily give a completely fallacious high reading). From the rest, pick any of the (few) well-maintained and sited stations witha long record and look at the trends. As Michael Chrighton pointed out in “State of Fear” using NASA records, places like Syracuse, Albany and Oswego in New York state all show a decline, along with many others round the world.
You don’t need a temperature database, just look at local trends.
And finally: “Whither in the regions nether –” Isn’t there a typo? Surely it should be “wither”?

[Whither–> interrogativeadverb
to what place or state: whither are we bound? | they asked people whither they would emigrate.
• what is the likely future of: whither modern architecture? . . I think the usage is correct . . mod]

Nick says ‘On the basis of the instrumental temperature record alone, it is possible that that global surface temperatures have been flat for more than 100 years (…) can anyone prove me wrong?’

I can’t prove you are wrong. If all thermometers on every square inch of the world would show positively correlated results, an arbitrary selection might do. Because in the USA alone about 30 percent of the surface stations show negative trends and 70 percent positive trends over a certain period, the earth surface is a melting pot of ups and downs (interactions). So I have to prove that the instrumental record is a perfect representative sample before anything could be said about the mean. Our record almost certainly is a biased sample.

So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.

You fail to define ‘long term’ if we take the Holocene as a whole the temperature trend is significantly down and the brief rise in the last 80 years or so is a totally insignificant echo of previous warmer optima.

Has Steven Mosher changed his mind about global warming and started to worry about CO2? This is not a rhetorical question. I would simply like to know what caused him to change his mind if he has changed it.

Excellent article! I especially enjoyed Betjeman’s “Highland Winter,” in which the warmer weather may–if we wish–be likened to Poe’s “lost Lenore.” This poem has much in common with “The Raven”, including meter and rhyme scheme (“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore!'”)

Absence of correlation may also be due to lack of sample size.
If climate doesn’t change in years but rather in centuries an observation period of 17 years may be without significance, in particular with high data volatility.
However the flattening observed over the past 17 years invalidates all models that are not able to reproduce it (or were not able to predict it).
And by using invalid models there is a probability bordering certainty that any prediction will be invalid.

This article lays bare the evidence revealing the truth about the catastrophic man-made global warming scare created by the IPCC, and promoted by key players of the warming establishment.

When Hal Lewis resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) on 6 October 2010, he referred to the global warming scam that had corrupted so many scientists and that had carried the APS like a rogue wave. He stated, “It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.” Referring to the climategate emails, he added, “I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.”

Well, I think Hal Lewis described the precise state of affairs in which the world now finds itself in relation to dangerous man-made global warming. Only, that it’s not just scientists but it also extends to various politicians, economists, academics, the media, governments, environmental activist organisations, and the business community that is always too happy to feed off “green subsidies”.

It is as though the “IPCC mantra” released a vicious virus that has now caused a corruption so severe, it seems almost impossible to eradicate.

Anthony, the comment:
” davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2013 at 7:17 pm
And I went unto the Warmists and said Fear Not! For the CO2 is logarithmic and the T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics….”

is very well done, its hilarious – I think you should consider raising it to a post (Friday funny style) of its own!

Incidentally, the new millenium did not start in 2002, that is just another cherry pick. Now if you want to argue that there has been a change in the underlying rate of warming, then the thing that will convince me (as a statistician) is statistically significant evidence for the existence of a change point. There is a good reason why no skeptic has done so, which is that the statistical evdence for the existence of a hiatus is not significant (i.e. it is adequately explained by the noise in the data, principally ENSO).

Its amazing how the most ridiculous arguments about remote possibilities the models could still be right are invoked by alarmists, but they dismiss out of hand any possibility they are wrong.

Almost as if they have a very unscientific emotional attachment to their current theories.
=====================

It’s called ‘Group Think’. The Book “The Best and The Brightest”, David Halberstam is an example of ‘group think’. It details how the Kennedy Administration brought together some of the most brilliant minds in the country and yet, these minds brought us the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.

When a ‘group’, in this case ‘Climate Scientists’ adopts an idea, no matter how misguided or wrong it may be, the group will actively attack anyone who questions the idea, regardless of the amount of factual evidence that shows that the idea is most likely wrong.

In the case of CAGW the ‘group’ has far too much invested in the way of professional reputations, funding, and influence on political policy to ever say, “Observational evidence has disproved our theory.”

“Mark Bofill says: December 16, 2013 at 7:51 pm
It seems the point was to tell us we are wrong without explaining why.
causation can exist when correlation is zero. The upshot of these two facts is that, in general and without additional information, correlation reveals literally nothing about causation. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for it.

HenryP, I note that you have not admitted that UAH is not actually an outlier (as you suggestsed) and that in terms of trends since 1996 it is in good agreement with GISS LOTI. Your most recent post is just evasion to avoid admitting that the use of RSS is essentially a cherry pick.

SAMURAI, you have chosen Monty Python’s Holy Grail scene well. It holds ridicule, which according to Al Gore, stings. The hilarious causality analysis of the witch scene may already be too subtle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp_l5ntikaU. But never mind, imagine the inspiration CAGW is donating to entertainment professionals of the future generations.

This statement contains the unspoken assumption that there is ‘warming’ from CO2, we just can’t see it. Kind of like the ‘heat hiding in the deep oceans’ argument. I don’t see how you can make that assumption. it’s an equally valid statement to say that there are many factors overriding ‘the cooling’ that we know is there, we just can’t see it.

SkepticGoneWild, the difference between the trends starting in January 1996 and September 1996 is fairly minimal, and so the use of RSS is still a cherry pick. If Monckton’s argument was a good one, it would have been good whichever dataset he used to make his point. That he chose the dataset that maximised the evidence for his arguement is an indication that it was a bit shaky.

“which means there is a 95% chance that the true trend lies between -0.104 °C/decade and 0.304 °C/decade. Any questions?”

No, that is not what it means, you are confusing a frequentist confidence interval with a Bayesian credible interval, they are not the same thing.

dikranmarsupial says:
You don’t like RSS. We get that. It doesn’t fit with your CAGW ideology. We get that too. See, with RSS, you don’t get the extra oomph from UHI and poor siting. Too bad. Live with it.

@dikkranmarsiupal
It is you who is confusing the issue.
Clearly the trend from 1987 until 2002 of all data sets was in a similar direction (warming). From 2002 UAH is the only one that goes flat (green now), whereas all of the others are going down (cooling):

Thank you sir. I wasn’t aware of those. Also thanks in general to several other commenters who pointed this and related items out. I didn’t realize sea level rise was plausibly disputed. If sea level isn’t rising, that certainly addresses the argument.

Davidmhoffer,

If CO2 is warming up the earth, how does it manage to warm up the ocean WITHOUT warming up either the land surface or the sea surface?

Perhaps you can actually investigate your colleague’s claims before admitting defeat. Perhaps you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Thanks Reg. I investigate claims to the degree that seems reasonable to me. If my standards don’t measure up to what you think they ought to be, I don’t care. If you think I’m a wolf in sheeps clothing, I still don’t care. I could be Michael Mann in bad drag or Richard Feynman speaking from beyond the grave for all the relevance it has on the actual arguments and their validity. So, thanks. But no thanks.

As Steven Mosher suggests, ‘Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation’, is incorrect. Say A is a cause of B, but C is also a cause of B, it would certainly be possible for the effects of C on B to temporarily mask the effects of A on B such that there was little or no correlation between A and B, even though they were causally related. For example, if increasing CO2 levels (A) were a cause of surface temperature changes (B), but ENSO (C), which affects the exchange of heat between the oceans and atmosphere, were also a cause of temperature changes (C), then the effects of ENSO could mask the effects of CO2 on surface temperatures, especially if you only looked at a short period of time over which the quasi-cyclic effects of ENSO could not be reasonably expected to average out to zero. There is a good reason why climatologists tend not to draw strong conclusions from trends over periods less than about 30 years.

Now a statistician would try controlling for the effects of ENSO in assessing the correllation between CO2 and temperature, and oddly enough, that is just what Foster and Rahmstorf (http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022) did and found that once you eliminate the effects of ENSO, the correllation is pretty good.

@ferdberple says: December 16, 2013 at 5:46 pm
@@MACK1 says: December 16, 2013 at 5:38 pm
please direct me to the scientific research listing and quantifying all the factors which caused the earth to move in and out of ice ages in the pre-industrial era.
============
How about a single climate model that can reliably recreate the Medieval, Roman, Minoan, and previous Holocene warnings, without the need to selectively employ volcanoes as the universal explanation.
===========================================================================
Volcanoes. Or dogma. Take your pick

Bruce Cobb There is nothing wrong with the RSS dataset, the point I am making is that you shouldn’t cherry pick the dataset that most strongly supports your argument (as Monckton has done), you should either show the range of datasets or if you are really confident that you are right, the dataset that shows the *least* support for your position. If your argument is really solid, you don’t need to cherry pick evidence to support it.

TBear says:
December 16, 2013 at 7:15 pm
‘Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.’
Sloppy overkill. Many factors could be overriding the warming.
Disappointing, Mr Monckton.
==================================================
“overriding the warming”. So – if it’s cooling, it is now “overridden warming”, is that it? Climate as a cyclical phenomenon is no more?

Beardy bloke in sandals on a bicycle. The world has gone completely mad.

A lot of very simple reasons associated with big egos losing their jobs.

Here’s my starter for 10, solely focussing on the UK, a list of those whose reputations are dead and should pay the price in employment terms:

1. Steve Connor – ‘science’ editor at the Independent.
2. Geoffrey Lean – ‘environment’ correspondent at the Daily Telegraph.
3. George Monbiot – self-styled ‘Professor’ who scribbles at the Guardian.
4. Ed Davey, the Minister who publicly lied about this on BBC’s Question Time in late 2013.
5. The lead researchers at the CRU, University of East Anglia.
6. A long list of ‘academic’ researchers who have been troughing on Govt research grants.
7. Roger Harrabin, who breaks every part of the BBC’s charter concerning neutrality.
8. David Shukman, ditto.
9. Several senior managers and Executives at the BBC due to long-term, mainstream brainwashing using false science.
10. David Attenborough OM, supposedly a ‘leading light’ scientist.
11. Professor David King, erstwhile Chief Scientific Advisor to HMG.
12. Sir John Houghton, ditto.
13. Tim Yeo, Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on matters concerning renewable energy (it is noteworthy that his constituency association want him chucked out over numerous ethical conflicts of interests/violations in this regard).
14. Mr David Cameron, whose daddy-in-law receives rather a lot of subsidies for allowing wind turbines on his land. Lest you are not aware, Mr Cameron is the latest in a distinguished line of First Lords of Her Majesty’s Treasury, more commonly known amongst oiks as the Prime Minister of Her Britannic Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
15. Mr Edward Miliband, the genius who guided the Climate Change Act onto the statute book of Her Britannic Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, who is now the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in the House of Commons and is, worryingly in the eyes of many, seen as a likely prospective successor to the roles which Mr Cameron currently holds.

Not to put too fine a point on it, those who have powers to control the levers are doing very well, thank you very much, from the omnishambles which is called ‘global warming policy’ in the UK.

My advice to any insurgent who becomes PM in 2015: on day 1, reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the UK public using saturation coverage on the BBC and in the right wing Press and abolish the Climate Change Act as your first act of responsible Government.

If there is causation, there must be correlation. It is a mathematical rule.
Therefore, the absence of correlation must mean there is no causation. Because if there were causation, there would absolutely be correlation.

Dikranmarsiopal quotes:
(http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022)
where it says
We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr−1.

Of course if higher atmospheric concentrations of anthropogenic CO2 is correlated to either global warming OR global cooling the larger argument is over, the models need rebuilt from scratch, and the High Priests of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming still have a lot of explaining to do.

But yes; something can be (at least statistically) uncorrelated and directly related, given an intervening superseding factor that causes the effect to be the negative of what it otherwise would have been. Kind of like a Rube Goldberg device for math.

Outside of quantum mechanics and the social “sciences” I am not sure we run into this very often.

Bob wrote “High Priests of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming” sorry, I have learned over the years that as soon as somebody starts using this kind of blogsphere rhetoric, the chance of rational discussion is pretty much nill. I am always happy to have a rational discussion about science, but I have no interest in rhetoric, life is too short.

@dikranmarsupial,
If something is flawed, it isn’t “cherry-picking” to disregard it, n’est-ce pas? It is, however, cherry-picking on your part to want to include data that is flawed. All in a days’ work for a True Believer though, right?

Bob Kutz says:
December 17, 2013 at 6:50 am
Im not so sure we rarely run into it…think about what happens as a cold front moves through during the day…we know that sunlight is positively correlated with increases in temperature, but sometimes it gets colder during the day as a font moves through.
just sayin that when you have multiple independent variables acting on one dependent variable you can get some confounding results.
thats all.

dikranmarsiopal says
Bruce, O.K., so tell me, why is the UAH dataset flawed but not the RSS dataset?
henry says
clearly, I have shown you that there must be something wrong with UAH as it is the only one out of 5 data sets ( 6, if you include my own) that shows the wrong directional trend from 2002?

HenryP, no there is no circle, there is no statistically significant difference in the trends in any of the surface or lower trophosphere datasets since 2002. It may be your opinion that there is something wrong with the UAH dataset, but it is just that, your opinion that is not supported by the statistical evidence.

RichardLH, yes, that is the point. Neither RSS nor UAH is “right” or “wrong”, but they differ, so if someone picks the dataset that provides the strongest support for their argument and ignores the other, that is pretty much the definition of cherry picking.

Well I would like any warmist to explain how the increased heat from CO2 mostly went into the atmosphere from 1980 until 1998, and then suddenly decided to bypass, not only the atmosphere, but the first 700 meters of ocean?

Doug Proctor, GHGs may be the dominant forcing according to mainstream science, but that does not mean that it dominates internal variability (e.g. ENSO) over the short term, so Steven Moshers criticism is still valid.

I was intrigued by Monckton of Brenchley’s logical proof that lack of correlation implies lack of causation, given that timetochooseagain and Richard D and dikranmarsupial have provided counterexamples.

I believe the resolution of this contradiction lies in the difference between the natural language meaning of implication and the formal logic meaning. When we say “correlation does not necessarily imply causation”, we mean that there are sometimes cases where you have correlation but not causation, but we are not excluding cases where you have causation but not correlation, or both, or neither. But for the formal logic statement “NOT(corr IMP caus)” to be true, you must have correlation and not causation in every case – it excludes the other cases. They are not equivalent statements. This is covered by the “relentlessly unreliable” Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxes_of_material_implication , paradox #6.

So Monckton of Brenchley’s logical proof is valid, but it is not a proof of the natural language assertion that “since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation”.

Richard111 says:
December 16, 2013 at 11:41 pm
I accept Lord Monckton’s conclusions. As a self taught layman I have a theoretical question; What would be the equilibrium temperature of a black body permanently irradiated by long wave IR in the range 13 to 17 microns?
Be more precise.
it depends how it is irradiated, it depends of its shape , if depend of its matter, it depends of the assumption that it can or not back radiate to the source of incoming radiation, and it can take billions of years to reach equilibrium… (the most bizarre hypothesis would be a uniform radiation on its surface)..and its depend on how you define equilibrium…there may be and equilibrium but first because it is not a thermodynamic equilibrium , there is no defined temperature and it is even very unlikely that the object would be in an homogenous state of excitation (‘ just imagin a long cigare shape object irradiated on its edge)…so there would be many way to define a pseudotemperature of the object.

My bet is that the upward adjustments have not stopped at all, they are still artificially moving the “GAT” higher a tiny bit every month and those charts should already show a downward trek since about 2005. These upward adjustments are nearly linear and have been applied since the 40s in one form or the other.

Try this for rational; if Y is uncorrelated to X, can Y be the cause of an increase in X in lieu of an intervening superseding factor?

I want you to show how an uncorrelated Y can drive X higher, since that is the point you wish to stand on.

If you choose to abandon the discussion because I dared impugn the character of some unnamed climate scientist, I think you prove where your heart really lies;

On this side, I have watched people be accused of being in the pocket of big money interests in an effort to avoid debate on the actual science. People who are skeptical (in the most scientific sense) are routinely called deniers simply for raising valid questions. I’ve watched as “scientists” conducting research paid for with government grants have obfuscated their data and claim their data was “proprietary” in the face of the owners of the data claiming that it was not. I have observed scientists using lawyers to avoid legitimate FOIA requests, claims that resources provided by public moneys were private information, one attempt to claim attorney client privilege where clearly none existed and one guy claiming he won a Nobel Peace Prize when the Nobel committee says, unequivocally that he did not. This is not science.

I am sorry to have impugned the character of High Priests everywhere.

But if that is your excuse why you don’t want to entertain the discussion, so be it. At least I now have an understanding of what you believe in.

Doug Proctor, GHGs may be the dominant forcing according to mainstream science, but that does not mean that it dominates internal variability (e.g. ENSO) over the short term, so Steven Moshers criticism is still valid.

Well, we don’t know if this was consistent with Steven’s argument, since he did not elect to make an argument beyond his flat assertion.

This aside, we are reaching the point in our observations where we can start to say with confidence that our understanding of warming due to GHG forcings and internal variability is wrong, if GCM’s embody our understanding.

We can entertain ourselves all day long by looking for obscure exception cases or (IMO) misinterpreting what the statement ‘causation implies correlation’ is supposed to mean, but with respect to this specific problem / climate change, the IPCC expected to see some .2C warming per decade that hasn’t shown up – in THIS case certainly, it was our mainstream best science understanding that causation would imply correlation. Maybe Steven’s criticism is valid. It doesn’t appear to me to be particularly meaningful.

not particularly, but as I said life is just to short wasting it on rhetorical arguements when we could have a rational productive discussion of the science without the name calling etc. You response (above) just confirms that you are are one of those primarily interested in rhetoric and not worth responding to further.

We have had higher temps in this and many other Holocene’s with no link to CO2. What is more AGW would cause the Troposphere to heat up…no trace despite the best efforts of the Aqua Satellite and milions and millions of weather balloons. With CO2’s ability to create heat being logarithmic it cannot overheat the planet. The reason whey the AGW scientists and believers can’t face their own ignorance is that they are finished…some of them should face prosecution.

Dear Jiuice, December 17 at 8.81 am: IIt has nothing to do with Monckton. It has to do with a conglomerate of more or less analytical brains (science) which are trying their best to understand where (if this is at all possible) the climate is going. The reason why this is of any importance (to you) is that models, the virtual worlds, are at odds with the real world, measurements. The current grip of the “modellers” on politcal decision making is costing societies billions, if not trillions of counting units (euros, dollars or bitcoins). We (societies) appear to be in the grips of science activitists, which I think is not a good thing!

Spencer provides a scenario by which a series of rather improbable events could all be occurring at the same time, then points out how improbable that is, and that there is no physical evidence to corroborate any of the possible drivers that must be present for any of it to work. But you missed my point. If CO2 in fact injects such large amounts of energy into the oceans, then why does it NOT do the same over land? Does the CO2 shine only over water? Since land can NOT mix energy downward by ANY series of improbable events, the temperature rise over land would have to be much higher for the same radiance over water. The only way to get around this is to assume one set of highly improbable events with no corroborating evidence is in effect over water and that a DIFFERENT set of highly improbable events that we can’t even come up with a THEORY for and which have no corroborating evidence are in effect over land.

Mike says
I think -> I am
I am not ->
Henry says
I am afraid that there are some here who really do not appreciate the fact that the probability that there is in fact no God is just about like being zero, just like me calculating that the probability that we exist at all is just about zero…

Re causation and correlation.
I am not sure our Noble lord is correct.
Let us take a data set:
A white swan
A black duck
Let us say that “being a swan” is S & “being white” is W.
Then causation would be written S -> W (being a swan implies it is white)
Whereas correlation would be S = W (The colour is determined by whether or not it is a swan)

So we have two possible instances of lack of correlation.
The first is a black swan. The other is a white duck.

So if we find we have a black swan in our sample then it is true that ~ ( S->W) (that being a swan no longer implies the bird is white). So, yes lack of correlation means lack of causation.

However if we take the white duck, the statement “If its a swan it implies it is white” is not negated by finding a white duck.

So the lack of correlation does not necessarily imply lack of causation.

I believe the route of this is that if S-> W (if its a swan it is white), doesn’t tell us anything about the world if it isn’t a swan. So ~S -> ?

The worth of the posting is the question phrased: “What happened to the warmer weather?” Yes it’s seventeen years and counting and the global climate models have crashed and burned, although there are those who pretend that these are still flying(such as Dikran Marsupial and other holdovers from the Cretaceous). We of the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere need some warmth as record cold holds us in an icy grip. Bring us the warmth that you promised.

Wait a second. Except that the atmosphere circulates. How much temperature increase is going to be noticeable over land before it blows out over the ocean?
In general I agreed with your response. I’m not 100% sure about the over land distinction. I’d think that wouldn’t be all that hard to check, although I’m not going to check it right now. But if the IPCC expects a trend of .2C per decade, it seems like we’d have to have awfully accurate land measurements to detect a difference in the rate of warming over land during the atmospheric circulation ‘window’ over land.

The trolls are out in farce again. Mosher and the furtively pseudonymous “Juice” merely resort to childish yah-boo, while the furtively pseudonymous “Dickrot Marsupial” whiffles and waffles about whether the fact that correlation does not necessarily imply causation implies that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. Of course the trolls don’t like this, because the real-world evidence is that CO2 concentration continues to rise and global temperature does not.

Mr. Born disagrees with the truth-table for implication: I refer him to any elementary textbook of logic. Even “Teach Yourself Logic” gets that one right.

Another commenter says my logical proof is correct but inapplicable to the real world. Sigh! The whole point of logic is that it is the foundation of science. It is, therefore, intended to be applicable in the real world. However, it must be applied with care, and in particular with meticulous attention to the definition of terms.

Does anyone seriously suggest that the relentless uptrend in CO2 concentration is causative of the similarly relentless absence of an uptrend in global temperature over the past 17 years? The two are plainly uncorrelated, for one is rising and the other is not. And, at least over the past 17 years, they are causatively unconnected, for it is known that adding CO2 to the atmosphere should have caused warming, yet none has occurred.

One cannot conclude from the absence of correlation, and hence of causation, between the CO2 trend and the temperature trend over the past 17 years that there is no causative connection between CO2 and temperature at all. The analysis is confined to the period under review and cannot be generalized. However, the absence of correlation and hence of causation over so long a period as 17 years does call into question the relative magnitudes of the contributions of CO2 and of natural events to warming.

Finally, a troll (I forget which) moans -twice – that I cherry-picked the RSS data. No: I explicitly stated that RSS was the first of the five datasets to show no global warming at all for 17 years. If I had wanted to cherry-pick, I wouldn’t have confined the analysis to a zero trend: I’d have studied the number of years during which there has been no warming outwith the combined,measurement, coverage and bias uncertainties in the data. For HadCRUt4 that,s 18 years; for RSS it’s getting on for a quarter of a century.

So the trolls may screech and snarl, but the real-world evidence, clarified by the cold, hard light of logic and reason, is that the game is up.

sorry, I have learned over the years that as soon as somebody starts using this kind of blogsphere rhetoric, the chance of rational discussion is pretty much nill.

Kind of ironic if you ask me. Several years ago Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. attempted to have a constructive dialogue on the Skeptical Science website. His last and final comment was:

John Hartz –

“Perhaps he’s had a long day and is just tired”

“Please let me remind you that it was you who chose to misrepresent my position and my statement on citations in your post @105, and at the same time belittle it. Now you are trying to take offense to the fact that I was annoyed/offended by you misrepresenting me and are trying to accuse me of being discourteous?”
_____

This type of exchange occurs too much on your weblog. These types of non-constructive comments are a major reason I stopped accepting comments on my weblog.

Therefore, I appreciate you giving me an opportunity to express my views. Readers on your weblog who have not commented can make up their own minds on the exchange of views that have already occurred. However, I require a courteous exchange of viewpoints, even when there is disagreement, and, unfortunately, except for several excellent open-minded and cordial comments by your readers, a large fraction of the comments are not of that type. Much of my effort is going in circles and repeating myself.

With the negative tone of their weblog (Skeptical Science), only those who are committed to the perspective promoted on their weblog will likely regularly read it. Its an opportunty lost, unfortunately.

Lord M says
One cannot conclude from the absence of correlation, and hence of causation, between the CO2 trend and the temperature trend over the past 17 years that there is no causative connection between CO2 and temperature at all. The analysis is confined to the period under review and cannot be generalized. However, the absence of correlation and hence of causation over so long a period as 17 years does call into question the relative magnitudes of the contributions of CO2 and of natural events to warming.
Henry says
my dear lord
my analysis points to a rather third degree role of the CO2
namely it promotes more growth, i.e. more greenery, even in the face of of decreasing moisture from outer space (due to the global cooling as mentioned before)
more greenery entraps some heat (increasing minima)
whereas less greenery does not (decreasing minima)
This is best seen from my results on Las Vegas (where they turned a desert into paradse) compared to Tandil (Argentina) where they chopped all the trees down….
hint:/;
look at all the results from the 3 tables of these two citieshttp://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/

Ah, but dear sire, does not their own “co-relation of evidence” conspire against their own “correlation of evidence”?

Thus, the CAGW religion has as its central and dominating belief the following: “CO2 has significantly increased (due to anthropogenic causes) AND we have experienced “unprecedented” increases in temperature recently, AND any potential future increases in global temperature are “bad”, THEREFORE limiting (anthropogenic) CO2 release is REQUIRED to limiting (future) temperature increases.

Next to this single conclusion, everything else is trivial, and without all of these steps AND this conclusion, no other action is required nor desired, right?

Thus, the CAGW religions requires they offer evidence, and that evidence is teh single 25 year period when both CO2 and “global temperature” both increased. Co-relation (over a 25 year period) PROVES causation, in other words.

But does that co-relation even exist?

Prior to 1940-1945, CO2 was steady for long periods of time, and
Over many 25 year periods, global temperature fell 1/2 of 1 degree.
Over many 12-15 year periods, global temperature remained steady.
Over many 25 year periods, global temperature rose 1/2 of 1 degree.

After 1930, CO2 has risen steadily, almost certainly part of that increase is from anthropogenic releases..
Over three 12-15 year periods, CO2 has increased, and temperatures have been steady.
Over one 20 period, CO2 increased, and global temperatures fell 1/3 of 1 degree.
Over one 25 year period, global temperatures rose 1/2 of 1 degree.

Thus, out of every year over the past 30 million (when the both Panama Isthmus was closed up and Antarctica was separated from South America) the only “evidence” that the CAGW religion can possibly claim is that one single unique 25 year period (1975-1998) when both CO2 and global temperature rose at the same time.

Every other year contradicts their “evidence” …. Rather: The evidence supports Mosher’s CAGW argument: but only 25/30,000,000 percent of the the time.

MArk Bofill;
Wait a second. Except that the atmosphere circulates. How much temperature increase is going to be noticeable over land before it blows out over the ocean?
>>>>>>>>>>>>

You are now postulating that atmospheric circulation prevents the energy from warming the land but forces it into the oceans via processes that we cannot envision nor measure. In the meantime, all the things that we can measure, and which would have to change for such a thing to occur, are staying the same. You may as well postulate that socks disappear through a black hole in the back of your dryer and appear in your closet as a clothes hanger.

Ah, I’ve now found which troll it was that whined that I had cherry-picked my data by choosing the RSS dataset. It was PJ Clarke, who also wonders why I drew conclusions from a trend with a correlation coefficient of 0.000. Sigh! The correlation coefficient of a dataset with a zero trend is likely to be close to zero. Do the math.

Mosher executes a classic Warmist tactic; first response when confronted with a skeptical statement?….Find something, anything that can be challenged and draw attention to it…hoping that this will distract attention from the overall obviously correct nature of the statement.
Good luck with that guys!

Did I hear wrong? What do you make of these? These are just for the Arctic!

Christian Science Monitor – 8 June 1972
Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2,000.
[Bernt Balchen – Arctic explorer]
—————–
National Geographic – 12 December 2007
“NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.” ”
[Dr. Jay Zwally – NASA]
—————–
BBC – 12 December 2007
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,”…….”So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
[Professor Wieslaw Maslowski]
—————–
Sierra Club – March 23, 2013
“For the record—I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer. An event unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment, transpiring in the Arctic Ocean….”
[Paul Beckwith – PhD student paleoclimatology and climatology – part-time professor]

The furtively pseudonymous “DickoryDock Marsupial” complains that I referred to it as “Dickrot Marsupial”. Perhaps it would like to act like a rational adult in two respects: first, by using its real name, for its furtive pseudonym invites parody; and secondly, by making useful scientific contributions to the discussion rather than following its customary practice of being uselessly and anti-scientifically snide.

One appreciates that it must be disappointing that Dingbat Marsupial’s religion is being swept away by an unstoppable tide of real-world events, but it will have to learn to live with it. If it had done a little more science and a little less reading of Saul Alinsky’s playbook for communists, it would not have ended up in the pickle in which it, and other true-believing trolls, so enthusiastically but imprudently immersed themselves.

If Doormat Marsupial finds any of this global warming that it has been promising us, it would be most helpful if it would send us some here in Scotland. We’ve had a warm winter so far, but a Mediterranean climate would be just the ticket for Scotland. We could run all the silly windmills in reverse and use them as cooling fans.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 17, 2013 at 11:30 am
Ah, I’ve now found which troll it was that whined that I had cherry-picked my data by choosing the RSS dataset. It was PJ Clarke, who also wonders why I drew conclusions from a trend with a correlation coefficient of 0.000. Sigh! The correlation coefficient of a dataset with a zero trend is likely to be close to zero. Do the math.

You should take your own advice, the slope of the line has no effect on the correlation coefficient!
The correlation coef describes the goodness of fit, a perfect fit has a coef of 1.0, a coef of 0.000 indicates a random, nonlinear relationship between the two variables.

It is a common solecism to imagine that the slope of a trend-line has no influence on the correlation coefficient. However, take two datasets possessing the same least-squares sum. If one has a greater slope than the other, it will also tend to have a greater correlation coefficient. The difference is particularly marked when comparing data with a zero trend with data with a strongly positive or negative trend.

Its fairly simple, the warming vanished with the strong El Ninos. With the sun now entrapped in a weak cycle that wont be happening any time soon. Global cloud albedo has remained steady so no increased heat content in the oceans either by other means.

First, causality is a relationship between events whereas correlation is a relationship between variables. For example, ‘eating peanuts causes cancer’, is the expression of causality. For a correlation we need at least a 2*2 cross table with counts of subjects eating peanuts, subjects not eating peanuts, subjects with cancer, and subjects without cancer.
Second, causality is about a time order, e.g. you get cancer after eating peanuts. In the cross table this aspect is lost.
Third, causation implies non-zero correlation. If eating peanuts causes cancer, subjects eating peanuts will show more often cancer than subjects who do not eat peanuts. This suffices because a 2*2 cross table has one degree of freedom, guaranteeing the non-zero correlation. All evidence for causation, except for its temporal aspect, is summarized in the table. If it is not there it is nowhere. Try it with the classic example that hitting a ball causes its motion. In all trials you hit the ball you will see more often the ball moving than in trials you miss the ball.
Fourth, since causation implies non-zero correlation, zero correlation implies no causation.

Each global data adjustment after so many years makes previous exactly the same years warmer. The surface station data are comparing apples with bananas and oranges. No surprise every adjustment leads to further warming, In another number of years time when they cant get any more warming from that data set another adjustment will take place to try a scrape a bit more warming. Eventually with numerous generations behaving the same way, we will be in an ice age with deep snow during spring and autumn, but global temperatures will still be above average. Joking aside the satellite data in future should keep them reasonably honest.

That virtuoso demonstration of Lord Monckton’s symbolic-logic mastery would have been more compelling if it had related to the true demonstrandum, namely, “the proposition that, since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”

Now, that proposition is a little abstract, so let’s substitute the following, more-concrete one, with which we would have dealt more comfortably in the corn and soybean fields of Indiana, where I was raised:
If it’s dog, it’s black: p -> q

The fact that the foregoing proposition is not necessarily true seems a singularly unreliable basis for concluding the truth of the following:
It it’s not a dog, it’s not black: ~p -> ~q

Similarly, the fact that the proposition:
Correlation implies causation: p -> q
is not necessarily true does not establish the truth of the following:
Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation: ~p -> ~q

Monckton of Brenchley: “Mr. Born disagrees with the truth-table for implication: I refer him to any elementary textbook of logic. Even “Teach Yourself Logic” gets that one right.

Touché. In retrospect I see that in disagreeing with Lord Monckton’s statement about the truth table I had jumped ahead to what he had apparently understood from it.

Specifically, his statements seemed based on the belief that the “T” or “1” in the p -> q truth table means the proposition p -> q is true. It’s been a half century since the Jesuits taught me this stuff, and the recent economics statements by that society’s best-known member may suggest the wisdom of treating those lessons with skepticism. But as I remember it those symbols mean only that the evidence from the p and q values is not inconsistent with that proposition’s being true, not that its truth is established.

A subtle point, I’ll grant you, but one that Lord Monckton might have done better to bear in mind.

Still, as written my disagreement was with the table, not, as it should have been, with the interpretation.

John T says:
December 17, 2013 at 1:53 pmIs NBC being accurate in stating that November was the warmest worldwide temps since 1880, and how if the temps were so high, the average amonthly temps is still flat? Who is lying?
According to GISS, the November anomaly was 0.77. This was the highest ever anomaly for November on GISS. (The RSS November anomaly, in contrast, was only the 13th warmest according to RSS.) For the year 2013 so far, the GISS average is 0.60 which puts 2013 in a 3 way tie for 6th place. The November anomaly of 0.77 was not the highest of all time when other months are also considered. The highest all time anomaly for GISS is 0.93 in January 2007.

I am sorry I did not make myself clear. I was not challenging correlaiton or lack thereof, I was showing examples of being WRONG on his side of the fence. Don’t you think the examples I gave are a bit embarrassing? Yet they continue to trot out their BS for your consumption. Eeeewwww!

NASA says November 2013 was the warmest November global temperature on record and this confirms the warming trend. According to the satellite data of UAH that is not true. I think NASA has reached an all time scientific low by faking the temperature data. This is not bad science this is fraud.

…………If it’s not thermal expansion, and it’s not melting ice, because both of those require energy, what exactly do I propose is the explanation.

You have been given various ideas above but here is something to consider. Sea level has been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age. Ask your friends was man to blame between 1850 to 1925?

Also consider water extraction for irrigation. Groundwater abstraction is about “one fourth of the current rate of sea level rise of 3.3 mm per year.”
Here is the paper’s abstract

and this

Abstract – 2011
It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.http://www.jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1

Mr. Born should perhaps not have attempted to stray into symbolic logic. Though this is not really the place to give him an education in the subject, a few general principles will emerge that may be useful.

First, the end and object of all logic is to establish whether one or more declarative statements or propositions, known in this context as “premises”, properly entail the conclusion. The premise or premises, taken together with a single conclusion, constitute what is called an “argument”. If the premises entail the conclusion, the argument is “valid”. If the premises are true and the argument is valid, the conclusion is true and the argument is “sound”.

Therefore, to ensure that one does not lose the thread of what can be quite a complex analysis of an argument (for instance, using not only Boolean operators such as IMP or EQV but also propositional calculus or quantifiers), one should remember Francis Bacon’s principle: Respice finem, or “look where you’re going”.

Let us apply that principle that one should constantly keep the end and object in view to Mr. Born’s statement that what he calls my “virtuoso demonstration … of symbolic-logic mastery” had related to a second route to the conclusion that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation – a route distinct from the first route.

My point was that a premise that Mr. Born had himself stated as being true necessarily entailed the conclusion that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. Mr. Born, instead of accepting that the end and object had been attained and the conclusion demonstrated, quibbles that I had demonstrated it in a manner distinct from that which I had originally used. Yet the end and object was precisely to establish the truth of the conclusion.
In demonstrating the conclusion using Mr. Born’s own premise I was illustrating the principle of Socratic elenchus, which is to use the interlocutor’s own premises, leaving him as little wriggle-room as possible.

I had already demonstrated my earlier method by a formal process and had even sketched out an algorithm that any programmer could run for himself to verify the validity of the argument and the truth of the conclusion in all circumstances.

Next, Mr. Born goes altogether off the rails by taking the statement (p IMP q) and calling p a dog and q black, so that the statement reads “It’s a dog implies it’s black”. So far so good. Then he also states, correctly, that NOT [(p IMP q) EQV (NOT p IMP NOT q)], or, in plain English, that the statement “It’s a dog implies it’s black” is not equivalent to the statement “It’s not a dog implies it’s not black”. No, of course there is no such implication: and nor did I make it or anything analogous to it.

Mr. Born has fatally misunderstood what the contrapositive of (p IMP q) is. It is not, as he suggests, (NOT p IMP NOT q). It is (NOT q IMP NOT p). And, whether Mr. Born likes it or not, it is true that (p IMP q) EQV (NOT q IMP NOT p). Again, in plain English, the statement that “It’s a dog implies it’s black” is equivalent to the contrapositive “It’s not black implies it’s not a dog”.

Mr. Born, having made this catastrophic error, then compounds it by repetition, asserting erroneously that I have attempted to maintain that “Correlation implies causation” is equivalent to “Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation”.

No: for it is well established that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. He had himself asserted earlier, and correctly, that causation necessarily implies correlation, from which I had drawn the correct conclusion that the correctly-stated contrapositive is true: absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.

Mr. Born does at least now concede that I had correctly described the truth-table for logical implication, but he then commits yet a further error by stating that truth-tables do not really indicate truth or falsity. Here, he has failed to understand how rigorous logic is. If each of two statements p, q joined by a logical operator (i.e. AND, or OR, or XOR, or IMP, or EQV) has a defined truth-value, then the truth-value of the conjoined statements is also defined: it is not up for debate. That is what truth-tables are for. If the truth-values assigned to p and q are correct in the real world, then the truth-value of the conjoined statements p [OP] q as listed in the truth-table for the relevant Boolean operator will also be correct in the real world.

Lord Monckton’s last comment contains a lot of verbiage, much of which is directed to how well I understand symbolic logic. I’m confident that I know it well enough for present purposes, but the issue isn’t my knowledge or lack thereof.

Let’s recall what the issue really is, in Lord Monckton’s own words: “So let me provide a formal demonstration of the proposition that, since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”

I responded that such a logic chain’s validity can be tested by comparing it with a chain of inference that is exactly parallel but whose propositions are less abstract. Specifically, we know that the following is not necessarily true: if it’s a dog it’s black. Can we conclude as a consequence that not being a dog implies not being black? Of course not. Nor can we conclude from the fact that correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.

So even if absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation (and I don’t think it does), Lord Monckton’s “formal demonstration” does not prove it.

lemiere jacques says:
December 17, 2013 at 8:00 am
Thank you for your response. I left all options open in the hopes someone used conditions unknown to me that would result in an equilibrium temperature above 223K.

Mr. Born persists in questioning the fact that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. Earlier, he had correctly talked of “the valid proposition that p IMP q is equivalent to NOT q IMP NOT p”.

That being so, it follows that the valid proposition that the (true) statement that causation necessarily implies correlation is equivalent to the (true) statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.

Or, in his terms, the valid proposition that the (untrue) statement that dogginess necessarily implies blackness is equivalent to the (equally untrue) statement that absence of blackness necessarily implies absence of dogginess.

Therefore, the statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation would only be false if it were false that causation necessarily implies correlation.

I agree that maybe this isn’t global warming, but climate change’s. Few years ago there were different weather conditions, but scientists should attentively observe climate because e. g. is written here http://blog.pulawy.com/en/global-problems-with-water-supply /dry regions are getting even less water, while places where plentiful rainfall had been common are now getting even more water. so in my opinion the temperature is changing and seasons are moving. and maybe now it isn’t global warming but in few years it will happen…

This is thread is distressingly pathetic! Joe Born and some others, have totally missed the point! In simple English, the Lord @Monckton of Brenchley, was using the warmist’s argument in disguise! If you disprove the logic of it, you also invalidate their argument and you are agreeing with him, as you should (In terms of deductive logic)! He was being mischievous and many fell for it!

The real world’s axioms involve there always being a trail. Even if intelligent people try to hide it.

It’s the reason only one in every – whatever – number of people are needed to police a society. People with absolutely zero imagination – indeed it’s worth it to lose a few crimes solved so over active imaginations don’t put the innocent in jail
can track things down most people figure – prolly no way to tell.

When a man puts his PhD on he line and systematically works with others to clear entire print journals of opposition to postulates he peddles

the process of even joining in the game is he has a set of comparisons.

desiring to deceive humanity for no other reasons than it’s fun, it beats working, and there’s a lot of money and political celebrity in being professional liars.

They can’t successfully predict which way sensors on the surface of a sphere illuminated to full temp in vacuum
will indicate temperature going if you immerse sphere from vacuum into a frigid, churning, thermally convective, and conductive, fluid bath.

want to make your school tell your kid the answer to the question which way the thermal sensors on that sphere will travel is that the temperature will go UP 90F/30C.

Your local magic gas hillbilly thinks submitting a hot sun warmed rock in a vacuum chamber to buffeting with frigid nitrogen/oxygen makes the temperature go UP and that your child, and his,
should be taught it in school.
And that because of this you should pay the government tax to use fire.

Such people are the class losers who ruined the Soviet Union for 75 years. Hillbillies and immoral slugs who actively protest alongside “sterilize the extra little people” elitists and humanity haters,

teaching your children,
that suspension of reflective media between an illumination source and heat sensors,
to the point 20% never arrives
makes the target sensors show more energy arrives
than when more energy arrives.

That is Greenhouse Gas Theory in action.

Immersion of a vacuum heated rock into frigid nitrogen/oxygen bath, physically reflecting 20% energy from ever seeing the rock,
made every heat sensor on the rock show temperature RISE 90F/30C.
When the thermal conduction
and the convection
aid cooling
the temperature of the earth magically climbed 90F/30C.

Yeah and when I close the door on my refrigerator and the light goes out the frigid swirling thermally conductive atmospheric air, keeps my soda warm till I open the door again and light coming in, causes true cooling to start since the air is colder than the soda.
=======
That’s the kind of clown talk these hillbillies want to tell your child in school to prepare her for a science curriculum. When it’s dark in a refrigerator, air many degrees colder than your soda heats it through backerdistical magical gais and laight.

======
Let’s don’t forget the further refrain that after removal physically through diffraction, of 220% energy in,
which made energy sensors record much more energy in than when there was
more energy in,

removal of another few percent light in through suspension of more diffracting H2O/CO2 will make all the sensors on earth show
even more light energy arriving
than when more light energy was arriving.

These three keys to Magic Gais and Laight are what you have to argue with.
Is it any wonder that not one word you ever speak down onto one takes any effect?
It’s politically oriented scientific scamming drawing criminopaths like crap pulls flies.

It’s not science never was, and when you let them reverse the algebraic sign of immersion of vacuum heated objects into frigid fluid,
the only thing you’re ever going to get from such arrogance in crime is the middle finger to you
and to real scientific evidence.

His Lordship and Mr. Born are making this thing too difficult.
Any (good) chemist knows that there are giga tons and giga tons of bi-carbonates dissolved in the oceans and that (any type of) warming would cause it to be released:

HCO3- + heat => CO2 (g) + OH-.

This is the actual reason we are alive today. Cause and effect, get it? There is a causal relationship. More warming naturally causes more CO2. It is not the other way around, as Al Gore alleges in his movie. Without warmth and carbon dioxide there would be nothing, really. To make that what we dearly want, i.e. more crops, more trees, lawns and animals and people, nature uses water and carbon dioxide and warmth, mostly. The fact that humanity adds a bit of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is purely co-incidental, and appears to be beneficial, if you want to have a green world.

I gather that that lady does not read WUWT and as Lord M said at the beginning of his post here:
“It is intriguing, and disturbing, that WattsUpWithThat is just about the only place where you will be allowed to see this or any graph showing the spectacularly zero trend line through 207 continuous months of data”
Never mind me who is banned from even posting at SS and other websites, like those of that other nutti fellow…
In South Africa I have pursued everybody in the media that said there is “global warming” to prove this to me from the data sets after showing them my own. As far as I know, it is now not being mentioned here anymore. I specifically warned them that I would go and take the matter to the broadcasting complaints commission if they did it again, i.e. causing unnecessary alarm.
I gather nobody is doing this in the USA? Apparently not enough… !!!

Also, I think in the USA, you will need to get the bible belt behind you. It seems Anthony still does not understand that religion and science are just two different ways to get to the truth. Both must come to the same Truth.

Caught out! Scott Wilmot Bennett has spotted some (but not all) of my Saturnalia mischief. My “formal logical proof” in an earlier comment is of course nonsense, and the computer algorithm is as unfit for its purpose as any of the general-circulation models, as Mr. Born (and to some extent Mr. Haseler) rightly spotted. I must apply for a huge grant for my model at once.

However, my proof based on Mr. Born’s own premise is correct and, therefore, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.

But there is one piece of egregious mischief that no one noticed at all. In the canon of Betjeman’s works there is no “Highland Winter”. I made it up. I did my best to emulate his style and, in particular, his occasional informality, his meticulous attention to scansion and his care with rhyming (his Eighteenth-Century Calvinistic Hymn pokes gentle fun at those who do not do their rhyming correctly).

I did leave one clue to indicate that the poem (otherwise quite a good pastiche, though I say it as shouldn’t) might not be by Betjeman. He would not have rhymed the homophones “whether” and “weather”, particularly in successive lines. In Scotland, however, we can get away with that, because we do not pronounce “wh” as “w”, but in a near-whistling fashion very close to the Maori pronunciation of, say “whaka”. or “whenua”. To us and the Maori, then, though not to Betjeman, “whether” and “weather” are not homophones.

Compliments of the season to one and all, and especially to Mr. Born, who wins the prize for seeing through my bogus logical proof. No literature prize is awarded this year, though.

Monckton of Brenchley: “That being so, it follows that the valid proposition that the (true) statement that causation necessarily implies correlation is equivalent to the (true) statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”

Monckton of Brenchley “Therefore, the statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation would only be false if it were false that causation necessarily implies correlation.”

Yes again. If Lord Monckton had proven that causation necessarily implies correlation, he would have proven that absence of correlation implies absence of causation.

But what the “formal demonstration” purported to show was something else, namely, that “since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.” It purported to reason from that first statement to that second statement.

Consider that first statement, “correlation does not necessarily imply causation.” None of the four combinations of presence and absence of correlation with presence and absence of causation is inconsistent with that statement; in no individual case does that statement enable us to infer presence or absence of causation from presence or absence of correlation. In contrast, the combination of absence of correlation.with presence of causation is inconsistent with the second statement, that “absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”

So any chain of logic that purports to infer the second statement only from the first is flawed.

Monckton of Brenchley: “Mr. Born persists in questioning the fact that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”

Well, it’s true that I question that “fact,” but I haven’t set out to disprove it on this thread. I merely attempted to point out where Lord Monckton’s proof was invalid.

No literature prize is awarded this year, though.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Too bad. I rather admire Mosher’s economy with words. Santa will be putting coal in your stocking this year you naughty boy. Let’s hope it keeps you warm this holiday season.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 17, 2013 at 1:02 pm
It is a common solecism to imagine that the slope of a trend-line has no influence on the correlation coefficient. However, take two datasets possessing the same least-squares sum. If one has a greater slope than the other, it will also tend to have a greater correlation coefficient. The difference is particularly marked when comparing data with a zero trend with data with a strongly positive or negative trend.

It is not imagination, it is a fact that the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) is invariant under a linear transformation of either X and/or Y, so your assertion is not correct. In any case it wouldn’t be a ‘solecism’. If you wish to continue that argument I suggest you take your own advice and ‘do the math’, let’s see a proof. While you’re at it you should perhaps look up Anscombe’s quartet.

Joe Born says:
December 17, 2013 at 7:04 pm
Nor can we conclude from the fact that correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.
===================
but correlation does imply causation. Otherwise we would not see learned paper using correlation in an attempt to “persuade” us as to causation. We would not see graphs of CO2 and Temperature as “proof” of AGW.

The problem is the formal definition of “implies”. It has different meaning to different folks.

In the 70’s such news would bring the alarm that we were about to plunge into a new ice age with glaciation of continents, mass starvation, and hunting mastodons for food. The Club of Rome decided that global warming would be a much more profitable control propaganda and so the UN set out to make it work, scientists found they could ride the wave as a wise career move, journalists and environmentalists chimed in with dire warnings that would keep themselves well provisioned and wealthy…al at the expense of truth and integrity.

And Compliments of the Season to Monckton of Brenchley and yours.
I called my wife to read Highland Winter. “That’s his own work” said my wife. :-)
I have made a copy for my future pleasure. Many thanks.
I have updated the author.

JRE says: “Seems like Moncton thinks there are only 2 variables at play here?” That’s the AGW theory, which said there would be a correlation between carbon dioxide increase and surface temperature increase.

The problem is the formal definition of “implies”. It has different meaning to different folks.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There’s also the cold war between Philosophy and Mathematics.

And the prize for personalities before principles and if I only had a brain goes to…………
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
markstoval says: Mr. Mosher……Any honest man with an IQ above that of an ape would understand
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
David Rodale says: Mosher, those of us who remember you from the CA days know over time you’ve become delusional at worse and pig headed at best.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ferd berple says: wrigglers, devoid of facts, himself gets it wrong.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
commieBob says: Really, arguing with Christopher Monckton about logic is about as clever as picking a fight with Chuck Norris.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chip Javert says: I guess he’s our pet troll, so we tolerate this trivia and waste time responding to zero-value-add statements. The term “…nailing Jell-o to a wall…” comes to mind.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Mario Lento says: No no… according to Steven Mosher,
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
PaulS says: Mr. Mosher: …….But, keep the faith.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
David, UK says: Argued with all the intellect of a character from the Monty Python ‘Argument’ sketch.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He right. I’ve had it with you Mosh. You have become a twat.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Phil” doubts whether a zero trend-line is more likely than a non-zero trend-line to exhibit a near-zero correlation coefficient. He challenges me to do the math I had asked him to do. So I have done it. Here are the trends in Kelvin per century equivalent, together with the correlation coefficients r squared, on the RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies for periods of 17 years 3 months commencing in September of each year from 1979 to 1996 inclusive:

Now, I did take the trouble to get my methodology checked by an eminent professor of statistics before I began producing these graphs, and he specifically confirmed that the r-squared had been determined correctly: nor was he as surprised as “Phil” was that it was at that time very close to zero, since the trend line had a very near-zero slope.

The table above does seem to suggest that as one approaches a zero trend, one is more likely to get a near-zero correlation coefficient. Now, I haven’t checked the sums of the squares of the residuals in each period, but I don’t suppose they are markedly different from one another. So, as I said earlier in this thread, the r-squared will tend to be less if the slope of the trend-line is less, and particularly where the trend-line is at or near zero.

What am I misunderstanding here? The data in the table do appear to suggest I have a point. I only ask because I want to know.

ferdberple: “The problem is the formal definition of ‘implies’. It has different meaning to different folks.”

In another context I would agree with you. If you’re talking about the discussion between Lord Monckton and me, though, I’m pretty sure Lord M. uses it in the mathematical / symbolic-logic sense: “p implies q” is the same as “if p then q.” And that’s the way I’m using it to.

As to your comment “but correlation does imply causation,” you’re probably right about different meanings for different people.

What am I misunderstanding here?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Perhaps you’re misunderstanding is that you’ve bashed and called out as trolls people who UNDERSTOOD you’re argument was BS before you asserted (I assume to cover your arse) that the assertion was crap……cheers, RD

What am I misunderstanding here? The data in the table do appear to suggest I have a point. I only ask because I want to know.

Henry says

You are on the right track. Apart from some weather noise, obviously the speed of warming in degree K per century is changing over time, naturally. That is what is causing the change in correlation.
I suspected that this was happening. Therefore I determined the speed of warming at separate intervals.http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
(please read the notes shown above the tables)
Observe that my results are given in C or K/annum. If you look at the bottom of my tables you will see the 4 results of the speed of warming measured over 4 periods of time.

Provided my sample of weather stations is globally representative, as I believe it is, you can now set out the speed of warming against time, even if there are only 4 measuring points.

I think my results are better than most other data sets as I spent quite some time thinking as to how to get a globally representative sample. I also think that a whole class of stats students can easily duplicate my results or even expand it, if you give each student a weather station to analyse.
(I have indicated how the individual black results in the table were obtained)

Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 18, 2013 at 6:09 pm
“Phil” doubts whether a zero trend-line is more likely than a non-zero trend-line to exhibit a near-zero correlation coefficient. He challenges me to do the math I had asked him to do.

I didn’t doubt it, I told you that the correlation coefficient is invariant to a linear transformation! That’s doing the math, it means that your statement wasn’t mathematically accurate!

So I have done it. Here are the trends in Kelvin per century equivalent, together with the correlation coefficients r squared, on the RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies for periods of 17 years 3 months commencing in September of each year from 1979 to 1996 inclusive:

That’s not ‘doing the math’ it’s just showing some random data and supposing a connection, you haven’t shown what you asserted, i.e. that given two datasets with the same least squares sum, the one with the lower trend would have the lower r.

The table above does seem to suggest that as one approaches a zero trend, one is more likely to get a near-zero correlation coefficient. Now, I haven’t checked the sums of the squares of the residuals in each period, but I don’t suppose they are markedly different from one another. So, as I said earlier in this thread, the r-squared will tend to be less if the slope of the trend-line is less, and particularly where the trend-line is at or near zero.

I suggest you ask that ’eminent professor’ to show you how to prove mathematically that there is a correlation between trend and r, what you have done doesn’t do so.

What am I misunderstanding here? The data in the table do appear to suggest I have a point. I only ask because I want to know.

You’re suggesting that a perfect fit to a near zero trend would not have an r value of one but rather near zero, I don’t believe that is correct. You asserted a mathematical connection, the onus is on you to prove it, particularly as it appears to contradict the mathematical result I referred to above. I look forward to seeing your proof.

Gareth Phillips says:
So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.

This is an example of the logical fallacy of Excluded Middle. It says there are only two options, rising OR falling temperatures, when there is another alternative, temperatures staying the same, as they are doing, or varying naturally, as they are also doing.

Second, the statement “the long term trend is still up” is false, as it fails to state how long is long term, or what that term is, when EXACTLY it starts and ends. Is the “long term trend” still up if you do not start that trend in 1979, the end of the last ice age scare ( Leonard Nimoy on The Coming Ice Age: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_861us8D9M ), but instead start that trend well before then? You could, say, start it in 1938 when it was so hot that movies became popular simply because the theater was the only place with air conditioning. What if you start it in the middle of the little ice age, what about the middle of the Medieval Warm Period when it was actually warmer then now ( http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/13/study-earth-was-warmer-in-roman-medieval-times/ ), what about the Minoan Warm Period and the two previous similarly warm periods before that that were even warmer? Obvious ‘scientific’ conclusion, Medieval s drove nothing but SUV’s, and Minoans drove nothing but monster trucks. What about the last ice age, the interglacial before that, the time of the dinosaurs when there were no ice ages ever, the…but you get the idea.

If you let me pick the start and end of any “trend”, I can make it go up, down, or sideways at will.

As Mark Twain famously wrote of that kind of extrapolation:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.

And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Third, you say “until there is a reduction in temperature”, OK, I’ll give you some. Before certain, um, “adjustments” to the temperature sets, 1938 was the hottest year in the last 100 years, it then got cooler (it is cooler than that right now), that’s a temperature reduction right there, and right now. “But”, you might say, “that’s before 1950, when industrialization really took off!” OK, lets go with that (at which point we must also assume the Medieval and Minoan industrial ages), now explain “Leonard Nimoy on The Coming Ice Age” which happened after that. For that matter, if we assume industrialization equals warming, we still haven’t explained 1938. We also cannot explain the warming after the little ice age which happened well before industrialization on any scale and which accounts for most of the warming between the little ice age and now. In short, there have been many reductions in temperature, as well as increases, which are not explained and cannot be explained by “majority climate science”, unless you want to go dig up those massively fossil fueled Minoan cities which must surely be buried under the sands somewhere.

And lastly “majority climate science” ??? You can have majority, or you can have science, you cannot have both. You can have a majority, such as the majority of “scientists” who believed that the sun went around the earth, or you can have actual scientists like Galileo who actually went out and observed to see what was what before they made up their minds. You can have “majority”, such as the “majority” of almost 12,000 scientists who 97% agreed with warming when 64 of them sort of agreed with it (the math seems a little off to me…). You can have “majority” imposed, as seen by climategate, where we see “scientists” colluding together to fire and blackball anyone who dared to publish anything that does not agree with warming, you know, like they did to Galileo, who we all know couldn’t have been a ‘real’ scientist, since he refused to go along with the majority. Majority?!? Only dead fish always go with the flow.

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

Let us be clear. Logically speaking, absence of correlation necessarily implies lack of causation – unless, that is, anyone really believes that the monotonically-rising CO2 concentration is the cause of the zero trend in global temperature over the past 17 years. Since causation necessarily implies correlation, the contrapositive is true.

Monckton of Brenchley wrote: “Since causation necessarily implies correlation, the contrapositive is true”, this is not correct, as I pointed out earlier in the thread, if there are confounding factors that can temporarily mask the effects of the causal relationship. In this case, the expected rise in temperatures due to GHGs is fairly small compared to the short term effects of sources of internal variablity such as ENSO, so it isn’t unduly surprising if you get occasional periods where there is no correlation between CO2 and surface temperatures (c.f. Easterling and Wehner http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL037810/abstract). Foster and Rahmstof (http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022) show that if you control for the effects of ENSO, the hiatus dissapears and there is once more a correlation between CO2 and temperature.

Of course I pointed this out earlier in the thread (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/16/whither-went-the-warmer-weather/#comment-1504689) but Monckton of Brenchley is more interested in rhetoric and childish insults in order to evade discussion of the scientific evidence. I have learned over the years there is no point in discussing science with anybody who will stoop to such behaviour, if the science is on your side, there is no need for insults or rhetoric.

If causation necessarily implied correlation, its contrapositive, that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation, would be true.

I don’t believe that causation necessarily implies correlation, but I haven’t been able to formulate a compelling counterexample. (The attempt by dikranmarsupial certainly falls flat.) Part of the difficulty is that the meaning of the proposition itself is not clear to me. For example, the Mandelbrot set’s range values are absolutely and exclusively determined by the respective domain values: causation clearly exists. But what does correlation mean in that context? I don’t know.

To give a concrete example, let f(x) = x and g(x) = sin(x), and h(x) = f(x) – g(x). Clearly there is a causal relationship from f(x) to h(x). However if you plot h(x) you will see that there is little or no correlation between f(x) and h(x) between approximately x = 6 and x = 7, even though h(x) is causally dependent on f(x). This is because g(x) is a confounding factor that temorarily masks the effect of f(x) on h(x).

dikranmarsupial: “you will see that there is little or no correlation between f(x) and h(x) between approximately x = 6 and x = 7”

This is a good example of why I’m disinclined to put any real effort into a discussion of the ultimate question of whether causation necessarily implies correlation. The discussion would quickly deteriorate into what the different interlocutors mean by the terms. In this case one wants to restrict the determination to a range and ignore the known effects of the “confounding factors.” In another, an interlocutor may want to use some transformation of one of the variables to take various system-dynamics effects into account.

Now that I’m retired I no longer have to argue when there’s so little chance of really joining issue.

Joe Born says
Now that I’m retired I no longer have to argue when there’s so little chance of really joining issue.

Henry says
Don’t do that! Being retired is no excuse for anything! If that is your attitude you might lose the opportunity eternity which is there, just for people like you and me! The battle for good has already been won.That happened 2000 years ago…http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/03/01/where-is-your-faith/
We will win!

Don’t worry about those who are not really interested about the truth, for their own evil or egotistical purposes. We all know that Big Money is invested in this green nonsense energy business.
Just write your own Christmas story, like I didhttp://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/12/10/my-own-true-christmas-story/
and stick with it, if that was the outcome of your own investigation.

henry@all
let us please not go into these stupid semantics about cause and effect
We all know that more warming causes more CO2
I have explained that this is simple 1st year chemistry
What we do not know for sure is whether more CO2 causes more warming or more cooling.
My data and the data quoted by LMoB suggests that the effect is zero or close to zero
live with it

“… -unless, that is, anyone really believes that the monotonically-rising CO2 concentration is the cause of the zero trend in global temperature over the past 17 years”

Deductively, that is a very good point!

Inductively, I do believe the monotonic rise in CO2 concentration and the zero trend in temperature can be correlated. At geological time scales CO2 has been shown to lag temperature. Many instances in the past show temperature flatten then turn negative while CO2 continues to rise only to turn and follow temperature back down, long after!

In the past, temperature has been the cause rather than the effect and the decoupling over the last 17 years only bolsters this position!

Dikranmarsupial quoteshttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL037810/abstract
where it says
All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr−1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010.

Looking at this graph, we can begin to rubbish the report that Dikranmarsiupal is quoting
First of all, you cannot “adjust” data. The data are what the data are. You leave them alone. You must not start fiddling with the data/
Clearly 2009 and 2010 were not the hottest years, showing more cracks in the report!
now, obviously I knew that the negative trend was going to happen, because I had first analysed all the data from maxima, where we can see that around 1995 we saw the end of warming and we see it turned to cooling- something that changed from outside to inside.http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
Now true enough, only my own data set looks at maxima and minima. This is a failure on all of climate science and I blame them all, not only the people quoted by D.
Clearly maxima tells you what trend to expect. I knew that there would be a a little time lag of 5-6 years from 1995 before we would see a general cooling trend because looking at maxima is like energy in which is not the same as energy out (means).
But most of all, for those who honestly believe in AGW,, is the lack of interest in looking at minimum temperatures. Namely, AGW theory proposes that there is a delay in (radiative) cooling due to more GHG. That means a something changes from inside to outside.That would mean that we should see an increase in minimum temperatures, pushing up means. That is not simply happening, which you can clearly see from my own data set and which everyone would be able to see if they would just get off their butts.

Scott Wilmot Bennett says:
December 21, 2013 at 1:00 am
HenryP, I agree!
Ever since I heard, from a climate modeller, that clouds also take up CO2 and rain bicarbonate ions, i’ve worried about the fact that the grid cells are too big to model them!

Clouds do take up some CO2 but they don’t rain bicarbonate ions in any significant amount, at the pH of rain dissolved CO2 concentration is 3 orders of magnitude greater than bicarbonate.

Dikranmarsupial quoteshttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL037810/abstract
where it says
All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr−1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010.

Looking at this graph, we can begin to rubbish the report that Dikranmarsiupal is quoting
First of all, you cannot “adjust” data. The data are what the data are. You leave them alone. You must not start fiddling with the data/ that is breaking all the rules.
Clearly 2009 and 2010 were not the hottest years, showing more cracks in the report!
now, obviously I knew that the negative trend was going to happen, because I had first analysed all the data from maxima, where we can see that around 1995 we saw the end of warming and we see it turned to cooling- something that changed from outside to inside.http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
Now true enough, only my own data set looks at maxima and minima. This is a failure on the part of all of climate science and I blame them all, not only the people quoted by D.
Clearly maxima tells you what trend to expect. I knew that there would be a little time lag of 5-6 years from 1995 before we would see a general cooling trend because looking at maxima is like energy in which is not the same as energy out (means).
But most of all, for those who honestly believe in AGW, is the lack of interest in looking at minimum temperatures. Namely, AGW theory proposes that there is a delay in (radiative) cooling due to more GHG. That means that something changes from inside to outside.That would also mean that we should see an increase in minimum temperatures, pushing up means. That is simply not happening, which you can clearly see from my own data set and which everyone would be able to see if they would just get off their butts and do some work.

I only talked about the oceans. Coldness is a sinc for CO2,
i.e. in the arctic and antarctic seas, CO2 gas dissolves to form bicarbonate/
Interestingly, the global cooling trend that I see coming could eventually bring CO2 down:
CO2 (g) + 2H2O + (more) cold => (more) HCO3- + H3O+

Together, note with me the lack of red squares (representative data) from 2005 onward, yet the trend line keeps going up…There is whole series in 2003 that is way below the trend line! There is only one square mark in 2007 at 360 ppm? The only other data they have past 2003 all seem below 320….. .Clearly it seems to they are not believing their own results anymore and are looking for other areas on earth to keep showing an increasing trend.?
The missing data from 2011 is also puzzling.

I think I will query Pieter on this. But I fear NOAA is all politics….?.they don’t know anything about the relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature?

That’s extent which is significantly effected by the winds rather than the temperature. As I recall it’s been unusually warm at the SPole lately.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/spo/images/spo_ccg_full.png
Together, note with me the lack of red squares (representative data) from 2005 onward, yet the trend line keeps going up…There is whole series in 2003 that is way below the trend line! There is only one square mark in 2007 at 360 ppm? The only other data they have past 2003 all seem below 320….. .Clearly it seems to they are not believing their own results anymore and are looking for other areas on earth to keep showing an increasing trend.?
The missing data from 2011 is also puzzling.

I should have said I agree that temperature plays a roll in the carbon cycle.

What a meant to say, also, but articulated very poorly, was that I personally wonder about the Slow Carbon Cycle! Temperature rise leads to more rain, which dissolves more rock, creating more ions that will eventually deposit more carbon on the ocean floor.

‘The movement of carbon from the atmosphere to the lithosphere (rocks) begins with rain. Atmospheric carbon combines with water to form the weak acid, carbonic acid, that falls to the surface in rain. The acid dissolves rocks, via chemical weathering, and releases calcium, magnesium, potassium, or sodium ions. Rivers carry the ions to the ocean. In the ocean, the calcium ions combine with bicarbonate ions to form calcium carbonate.’

In my opinion, the Slow Carbon Cycle could account for a lag in response to temperature (Even over the short term) because the formation (Or otherwise) of clouds determines how much C02 is actually taken up by them. The fact that clouds are poorly modelled is very important (To me!).

The non-equilibrium behavior of water vapour is a problem for models! Two masses of air, at the same temperature and pressure, with the same water content may or may not have clouds!

Scott W Bennet says
Temperature rise leads to more rain
Henry says
I am not sure if that is necessarily true, really.
we are looking at fairly small temp. changes over time, going up and down by about 0.5 degrees K each 50 years or so, and what it causes is that during a cooling period there is a contraction of more rainfall at lower latitudes whilst during a warming period the clouds (and rainfall) move more to higher latitudes. Hence more flooding of the Nile during a cooling period.
I have explained that all in my final report here:http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/

“In the ocean, the calcium ions combine with bicarbonate ions to form calcium carbonate, … In the modern ocean, most of the calcium carbonate is made by shell-building (calcifying) organisms (such as corals) and plankton (like coccolithophores and foraminifera). After the organisms die, they sink to the seafloor. Over time, layers of shells and sediment are cemented together and turn to rock, storing the carbon in stone-limestone and its derivatives.”

I wasn’t trying to be controversial or disagree with you!!
I just wanted to make clear that the Slow Carbon Cycle is important (To me,only)!

Hell, a number of Scientist claim, and I’ll quote to be safe:

“The uplift of the Himalaya, beginning 50 million years ago, reset Earth’s thermostat by providing a large source of fresh rock to pull more carbon into the slow carbon cycle through chemical weathering.”*

CO2(g) ⇋ CO2(aq) Henry’s Law
CO2(aq) + H2O ⇋ H2CO3 (Carbonic acid)
H3CO3 ⇋ HCO3^- + H^+ (Bicarbonate ion)
HCO3^- ⇋ CO3^2- + H^+ (Carbonate ion)
CO3^2- + Ca^2+ ⇋ CaCO3(s) Precipitation only occurs when [Ca^2+]*[CO3^2-] is greater than the solubility product, Ksp= 3.7×10−9 to 8.7×10−9 at 25 °C, Calcium carbonate becomes more soluble with increasing pressure (or depth in the ocean). So those sinking organisms when over sufficiently deep water will dissolve when they pass the carbonate compensation depth (about 4500m).
At the ocean surface the result of those equilibria is that bicarbonate is the predominant form.http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~sanpisa/OceanSed%20project/bjerrum.htm
increasing CO2 shifts the set point away from carbonate.

Phil. says
Well they had a heat wave there a year later!
Henry says
Note that global cooling will first become visible at the higher latitudes! Hence the increase in ice on the antarctic.
Remember: one heat wave doth not make the climate yet.
If you are interested in the climate in Alaska, I made a study of the temperatures in Anchorage, especially at the Elmendorff Airforce Base.
My original results come from here,http://www.tutiempo.net/clima/Anchorage_Elmendorf_Air_Force_Base/702720.htm

it is the second graph, not the first one. I am sure you must agree that the blue line is best fitted in a sine wave with wavelength around 88 years?

As far as average temps. in Anchorage are concerned, it shows now [-0.2] degrees C or K per annum from 2000-2012. This means that since 2000 average temperatures in Anchorage dropped by more than 2.4 degrees C.

So, tell me, honestly, how on earth is that possible without anyone taking notice?

Henry says
As far as average temps. in Anchorage are concerned, it shows now -.0.2 degees C
Henry says
Sorry, I don’t know where that extra dot came from.
it should read:
-0.2 C or K per annum
so the average decrease is 0.2K per annum since 2000.

HenryP says:
December 23, 2013 at 6:45 am
Phil. says
“Well they had a heat wave there a year later!”
Henry says
Note that global cooling will first become visible at the higher latitudes! Hence the increase in ice on the antarctic.
Remember: one heat wave doth not make the climate yet.

Precisely, neither does one cold spell such as the one you originally referred to!

it is the second graph, not the first one. I am sure you must agree that the blue line is best fitted in a sine wave with wavelength around 88 years?

Totally disagree, there’s absolutely no justification for your assumption of a sine wave!

As far as average temps. in Anchorage are concerned, it shows now [-0.2] degrees C or K per annum from 2000-2012. This means that since 2000 average temperatures in Anchorage dropped by more than 2.4 degrees C.

So, tell me, honestly, how on earth is that possible without anyone taking notice?

henry says
well that looks like bad chemistry to me……
(no balance in the Hydronium ions, neither are they correctly indicated
H3O+ instead of H+)

Clearly that’s a typo, should be H2CO3^- ⇋ HCO3^- + H^+, (as on the previous line), but there’s no provision for correction unless the mods care to do so?
Either H^+ or H3O^+ are acceptable, if you want to be pedantic H9O4^+ would be more accurate but showing it as a proton, H^+, is simpler with no loss of understanding..

Phil. says
Not in the ocean, the ones I showed are correct (with the exception of the typo).
Henry says
1) seeing that you are a chemist, you probably know how to make carbonate free water for your standard solutions.
Please tell us how you do it, why, and what chemical reactions you would write down to explain your actions?
2) it is generally known that when CO2 dissolves in water, a small percentage (I think about 0.1% of the dissolved CO2) will go into H2CO3.
Obviously the other reactions that you mention (minus the typo) play a role

but the net effect of more heat (COMING INTO THE ATMOSPHERE) is more CO2 in the atmosphere
and the net effect of more cold (COMING INTO THE ATMOSPHERE) is more bicarbonates in the oceans,
if, as I stated before, air pressures remain the same.

WHAT IS THAT?
Phil. does not know how to make a standard caustic soda solution…?
Neither does he realize how it is related to how the oceans behave in the face of (more) heat or (more) coldness
Must I tell you how we do it?
Does anyone here know?

HenryP says:
December 23, 2013 at 9:35 am
Phil. says
Not in the ocean, the ones I showed are correct (with the exception of the typo).
Henry says
1) seeing that you are a chemist, you probably know how to make carbonate free water for your standard solutions.
Please tell us how you do it, why, and what chemical reactions you would write down to explain your actions?
2) it is generally known that when CO2 dissolves in water, a small percentage (I think about 0.1% of the dissolved CO2) will go into H2CO3.

Since we’re talking about seawater as I pointed out before the majority of the CO2 is in the form of bicarbonate ion, look at the Bjerrum plot I linked. You can use the following calculator to calculate the composition:http://www.microcosmofscience.com/CO2%20and%20TIC%20calculator.html
For seawater at pH 8.05, T=15ºC, salinity 35ppK, and alkalinity 2.4 mmole/L you have 0.66 mg/L dissolved CO2 (0.015 mmole/L), bicarbonate 1.954 mmole/L, carbonate 0.181 mmole/L

Obviously the other reactions that you mention (minus the typo) play a role

They all do, it’s a series of chemical equilibria.

but the net effect of more heat (COMING INTO THE ATMOSPHERE) is more CO2 in the atmosphere
and the net effect of more cold (COMING INTO THE ATMOSPHERE) is more bicarbonates in the oceans,
if, as I stated before, air pressures remain the same.

I hope you understand why!

The effect of increasing water temperature is to decrease the bicarbonate concentration and to increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. That assumes no input of CO2, however increasing CO2 by fossil fuel combustion will cause a commensurate increase in bicarbonate, the relationship between all the components is governed by the set of equilibria that I listed.

Phil. says
The effect of increasing water temperature is to decrease the bicarbonate concentration and to increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
Henry says
So now you agree with me that this chemical reaction:
HCO3 – + (more) heat => C02 (g) + OH-
is a fair representation of what you are saying in your own words….

It seems to me that this reaction is also a fair representation for removing carbonates to make water for standard solutions, is it not?

HenryP says:
December 24, 2013 at 4:24 am
Phil. says
The effect of increasing water temperature is to decrease the bicarbonate concentration and to increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
Henry says
So now you agree with me that this chemical reaction:
HCO3 – + (more) heat => C02 (g) + OH-
is a fair representation of what you are saying in your own words….

Clearly you don’t understand standard chemical nomenclature, I wrote explicitly the mechanism in the form of the equilibria, the relevant reverse reactions due to the temperature shift in the equilibria are:
CO3^2- + H^+ → HCO3^-
HCO3^- + H^+ → H2CO3
H2CO3 → CO2(aq) + H2O
CO2(aq) → CO2(g) Henry’s Law

So a shift in the Bjerrum plot to the left.

If you want to add Kw there is of course: H2O ⇋ H^+ + OH^- where Kw ~10^14

Henry says
which is only making it complicated for the un-informed.
Truth is that my reactions to show what happens when it gets warmer and what happens when it gets cooler are correct if you want to summarize the point.

No you have 5 variables: CO3^2-, HCO3^-, H2CO3, CO2(aq) and CO2(g) which are in equilibrium with each other, when you change temperature the relationships between them all change. You need more than one reaction to describe that, much less a fabricated reaction which doesn’t actually take place! Using that single reaction misleads the un-informed such as yourself.

Truth is that my reactions to show what happens when it gets warmer and what happens when it gets cooler are correct if you want to summarize the point.

The best way to do that would be a Bjerrum plot like the one I linked to.

Scott Wilmot Bennett says:
December 21, 2013 at 5:31 pm
…
I should have said I agree that temperature plays a roll in the carbon cycle.

role
But it doesn’t. Heat does, and heat varies with water, mostly. Humidity, oceans, etc. “dampen” temperature swings = modulate heat transfer. The temperature is ‘intensive’, a consequence, not a cause.